Who Wrote the Blue Screens of Death | Hacker News Reader

Who Wrote the Blue Screens of Death

devblogs.microsoft.com

Funny I started reading the article and knew who the author was once they said they introduced the blue screen of death, none other than Raymond Chen. If you're ever reading an article with the microsoft icon in the tab, and think "Wow this is pretty intriguing or thought provoking!", just scroll up and you will see Ray's face, he's been killin' the microsoft blog for 20+ years. Here's one from 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=41...

The comments used to add so much discussion, insights and lore. It’s a real shame that Microsoft managed to kill the all twice during migrations.

Yeah, the death of comments sections really signified the end of Web 2.0 as something people eagerly believed in, rather than just a stagnant reality we're all trapped in. And they didn't die quietly - the real "Aslan slays the White Witch moment" happened when both major browsers removed the Dissenter extension, which allowed users to read and write comments on websites. These comments were shared among all users, and of course, sites couldn't censor them. Oh no! Luckily, now we're all safe from having the option to read uncensored comments, phew.

I don't endorse Dissenter, however, I do think it's death coincided with a vibe shift. Before that, there was kind of a left-libertarian vibe on the internet. Even banning obviously horrendous content would be met with hordes of "muh freeze peach" outrage from greasy web bois. It feels like the state and media managed to collaborate against big tech to reign them in as a competing power.

I say "feels like" because I have no idea what I'm talking about. Take everything I've said as seriously as you'd take "What if we are just really advanced NPCs and the whole universe is a video game for aliens" lol.

My point is, I miss comments sections (and I guess, that I project my nostalgia onto weakly evidenced conspiracy theories about the machinations of the state)

One could also argue that the unification of "commenting" under a small number of giant frameworks (reddit, disqus, facebook etc) contributed.

Back in the day you'd go on to a bulletin board for, oh I dont know, Volkswagens, and talk with a few thousand people. And your tone and style would be reflective of the culture of that specific site.

Now when people go to comment, they are using mass tools like FB or Reddit that bring their own culture to how commenters should act. For example, Facebook's comment culture, which injects politics into every conceivable discussion, now infects any site that allows comments using Facebook.

I find many of the problems with online social organization are isomorphic to real life social organization. It is cathartic as a libertarian to watch the centralized internet structures play out exactly like the current and historical real life organizational structures do, but at a much accelerated rate!

Dissenter must be revived somehow. Narratives are the 21st century theater of war and right now infrastructure is winning.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040514091226/http://blogs.msdn...

What I want to know is who wrote these haikus.

First snow, then silence. This thousand-dollar screen dies So beautifully

Yesterday it worked. Today it is not working. Windows is like that.

"You will lose any

unsaved information in

all applications."

I believe it was BeOS who if not first then most famously embrace haiku error out messages : https://gist.github.com/benjaminoakes/e58a9ddb0ead8eefbbae40...

e.g. Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers.

If you like this early Windows lore, Dave Plummer (creator of the original Task Manager) has a Youtube where he dives into this stuff: https://youtu.be/KgqJJECQQH0?si=E36pUB9CQeGTy_bu&t=525

While there were three different blue screens of death, all modern ones derive from John Vert's for Windows NT. And the shade Vert chose was the default screen background color from the MIPS RISC machine he built on.

On the other hand, Plummer is an unreliable source.

Care to elaborate?

Not sure what parent is referring to, but recent drama is that he's tried to hide / not discuss the fact that he wrote security scareware a while ago.

As soon as I saw the author was Raymond Chen, I immediately knew I was in for some true BSOD lore.

But the article is from July 30th, 2024, and last time I used Windows 10/11 and it crashed, it was neither of those.

So who wrote the latest iterations?

But now it has a QR code!

Ballmer personally wrote the Win 3.1 BSOD... Who knew?

Just the text. Not the code

I think early in the history of Windows, the first 3 versions or so, Ballmer's official role at Microsoft was head of Windows. I may be misremembering stories I heard about that timeline, though.

What I found annoying is the output does not seem helpful at all. Even if you are tech savvy or an IT manager, does the memory dump information help you diagnose the problem? Did the Microsoft programmers at least benefit from it?

If you load a minidump or full memory dump from a BSOD into WinDbg, the !analyze command can often tell you exactly what went wrong, i.e. the type of failure and which driver is responsible.

John Vert on that "I believe Mark Lucovsky wrote the original code that dumped a bunch of text to the screen. This was a bugcode and a stack dump, resulting in a bunch of useless hex numbers which product support would occasionally dutifully transcribe from the customers and include in the bug report."

https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-the-original-Windows-Blue...

Has anyone ever successfully used the BSOD register, memory, stack, status dump information to diagnose and fix a fault?

Are those values even useful given that the machine is halted and there's no way to inspect or read any additional information about what was running and where it was in memory?

I suspect there are a select few that can do this, but for the rest of us it's a reboot and reload situation. Also, those that could use this information probably also could fix and resolve the crash without it?

So, what's the point of even dumping that info to screen, instead of putting up a simple "oops, I died, time to restart" message?

Yes. When I've talked to ex-Microsoft people, they have ways to hook up an external debugger to the halted machine and walk through it. But the necessary tooling only exists at Microsoft.

I must disapprove of the anachronistic usage of fonts in those blue screen renders!

Yes but the screens are responsive and work on mobile—wasn’t expecting that.

That’s also anachronistic.

I was discussing this some time ago with a friend, I get the feeling that error messages these days try too much to apologize instead of providing the user with hints and clear explanations to solve the issue. It's all about emoji faces crying "boohoo there was an error" with a childish tone.

Can't wait to see AI avatars crying in front of you for failing to summarize an article.

Evergreen:

https://i.redd.it/bp22t4c46zk01.jpg

I want to know who had the stupid idea to start the UI trend of making error messages tell you absolutely nothing (e.g. "There was an error. Enjoy being helpless.").

Google ?

Unexpected error. /s

Like, could they have made the UX any worse?

Yes, they added a frowny face and less information.

It's minimalist because if the system is unstable you don't want to have to do anything fancy like open a window or look up a bunch of localized resources, as those could run into the same corruption that led to the initial problem.

My major complaint is that they show the stack trace and memory address information first. 99% of users don't care about that. The instructions about options to proceed and their consequences are solid. They should just be put first.

On other hand at this point I think users were coming from DOS where the latest and most relevant information was always at the bottom. Like during boot sequence or in general execution of programs.

It is not like modern Linux when showing startup steps updates to top either, but to bottom.

I mean, if the computer has crashed not sure what a nicer UX is going to do.

Make a drunken sad face.

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Sad_Mac

From Dave's Garage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgqJJECQQH0&t=2s&ab_channel=...

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