There's a 30-year mystery surrounding Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death

Californians flipping open work PCs were greeted with the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” on Friday morning as one of the largest cyber outages in history mostly bricked Microsoft systems across the globe. The outage, caused by a CrowdStrike software glitch, brought SFO to a standstill — stranding countless passengers at the airport with basically nowhere to go as scores of area hotels were completely unable to check guests in or out due to the outage.

A fix was deployed in the early hours of Friday morning on the West Coast, but the residual impact of the massive outage gave new prominence to the single worst screen for a Windows user: the “Blue Screen of Death,” an error screen that presents with white text on a blue background and signals an unrecoverable error has occurred that threatens to corrupt a computer itself.

Anyone that’s ever used Windows has likely encountered the screen before (probably many times, and likely at the worst possible moment), but who’s responsible for it being the stark white on blue that we see today — and have seen since the early 1990s — has been a source of some contention.

A Microsoft developer blog post from Raymond Chen in 2014 said that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1. That very benign post led to countless stories from tech media claiming Ballmer was the inventor of the “Blue Screen of Death.” That, in turn, prompted a follow-up developer blog post from Chen titled “Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death.” 

“Somehow, it ended up widely reported that Steve Ballmer wrote the blue screen of death. And all of those articles cited my article titled ‘Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1?’ Somehow, everybody decided to ignore that I wrote ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog’ and replace it with what they wanted to hear: ‘blue screen of death,’” Chen wrote in a lengthy screed.

Chen then later tried to claim he was responsible for the “Blue Screen of Death,” saying he coded it into Windows 95. Problem is, it already existed in previous iterations of Windows, and 95 simply removed it. Chen added it back in, which he sort of cops to, saying: “And I’m the one who wrote it. Or at least modified it last.” No one challenged Chen’s 2014 self-attribution, until 2021, when former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer stepped in. According to Plummer, the “Blue Screen of Death” was actually the work of Microsoft developer John Vert, whom logs revealed to be the father of the modern Windows blue screen way back in version 3.1.

According to Plummer (who spoke directly with Vert), the machine Vert used (a MIPS RISC box) and his favorite editor at the time (SlickEdit) both had white text on a blue screen and “using the same color led to a more consistent experience.”