Ballmer PERSONALLY wrote Windows 3.1's blue screen text Microsoft has revealed that Steve Ballmer himself penned the white-on-blue text that appears when users gave old Windows the “three-fingered salute” – pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL, in other words. Redmond's Old new thing blog offers the revelation that when Microsoft was hard at work on Windows 3.1 Ballmer was shown the CTRL-ALT-DEL …
Yep, have to agree. Reasonably informative, and gives options. Compare that to a web application I've had to use until recently, where I would log in and start doing stuff, then for no apparent reason get a plain white page, with just the following text:
"Error:
There has been an error!"
Great. Thanks for that. Might as well just say "Oh Noes!!!1111!one!".
I once worked on a system that, in the code, had a switch statement[1] with an else clause that output the message "This error cannot happen". It was a joke from the original coder, because if you looked at all the other conditions, it was indeed true that the else clause should never be executed.
Every few months or so, we saw "This error cannot happen" in the logs...
[1] Of course, we didn't call them switch statements in those days. They were CASE statements.
"Oh no, an unexpected error! Well, I wasn't expecting that."
NOBODY expects the unexpected error.
Its chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Its two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Its *three* weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Its *four*...no... *Amongst* its weapons.... Amongst its weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise....
"Although personally, I'm fairly sure most errors should read "Error: Something you can do nothing to fix has happened, just go google the following '0x80001234' and then do something else"."
Pretty sure my parents' version of Windows has been customised to say "Error: 0x80001234. Go and phone your son. But switch the computer off first and don't worry about that code - just tell him it's 'some number' and that'll be fine"
CTRL + C works for copying error messages from MOST dialogue boxes in Windows. Just make sure the window has focus, hit CTRL + C then paste into Notepad so you can extract the bit you want.
I emphasise most, because sometimes it doesn't work, which is frustrating.
I can beat that. Angered by all the talk-but-no-action at work over Linux (then the new kid on the block) I bought a copy of "Linux Unleashed" - I'd had a very positive experience with "Unix Unleased" and was hoping that experience would carry into the New World O' Linux - which came with Red Hat 4.2 on a CD-ROM.
I built the two floppy "boot discs", then popped the first one into the machine-to-be and was shown the message: "Error".
That was the entire text of the message.
I've been developing on Windows since version 2.0 and I must say that the blue screens on Windows 3.1 were pretty rare. Maybe I was just lucky.
The only versions that really gave me a lot of bluescreens were Windows ME and Windows XP - although the latter could usually be traced back to a dodgy memory module or ATi drivers.
I agree. We implemented a couple of thousand Win3.1 desktops running Word/Excel with a Novell 4.1 backend (that should tell you how long ago this was). Most users left their PCs running 24x7, logging in at the beginning of the day and logging out when they went home. We started getting occasional unpredictable errors - can't open file, that sort of thing - which were fixed by powering off and then on again (yes, I know) but returned after a few weeks.
We traced it to a bug in the Novell front end that was failing to release a couple of handles at logout. After a cycle of 20 or so, there would be insufficient handles (I seem to remember there were only 64 available to users, but memory is fading) for normal operation. When we reported it, we were told that no-one had ever seen a Windows system that had been operating so long without a reboot.
Try telling that to t'youth of today ...
Ah! Novell. Home of fsckwit sloppy coders. I worked at a large university, with a couple thousand users per server. Syscon would take forever pulling up the list of users.
We had "superset" - the senior Novell dev group - one day because we were so large, and one of them hit the user list "Please Wait" and exclaimed "Oh no, that user sort is a linear sort!"
Never has the icon been so appropriate.
Spoken like a true MS home-boy! Oh the irony of pointing the finger at Novell as what was it "home of fsckwit sloppy coders". They were light years ahead!
And just to concur with some other commenters the screen you get by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL is NOT the BSOD!
That is all! :-)
This post has been deleted by its author
I guess I'm getting downvotes because, on first impression, my post might look a bit spammy. It wasn't meant to be. I have no commercial connection with Rob Reid or his publisher. I just finished reading the book and rather enjoyed it. The "out-of-this-world" bit was not exagerated praise, it was just a reference to the non-terrestial influence on the development of MS Windows which is suggested in the epilogue of the book.
I don't wish to appear pedantic, but "BSOD" is usually used to refer to the stop screen in windows NT4 or it's successors, which is terminal and requires a reboot.
The screen in the screenshot allows the user to press escape to return to Windows and, as far as I can remember, a similar screen can be invoked in Windows 3.1 at any time using control-alt-del, so it's more like a system-modal dialog.
I was thinking the same thing: _that's_ not the BSOD. The BSOD is the one you see when Windows stops completely and does a memory dump. IIRC it dumps some address and status stuff to the screen in hex, dumps core to a file somewhere and then just halts. There's no pressing a key to kill an app or anything like that. You're done: you take a picture of the screen with a camera (or write down all the numbers you see) and then pull the power plug.
The article is about the BSOSALU (Blue Screen of Some App Locked Up). A bit annoying, but nothing like the actual BSOD.
Yes. And the article's not too accurate about Ctrl-Alt-Del, either.
In Windows NT and its descendants, Ctrl-Alt-Del is the Secure Attention Key sequence, which is rather a different thing than the warm-boot trigger it was in the original IBM PC BIOS (and thus under OSes that didn't intercept it), or the interrupt-the-application functionality (a bit like the SysReq function for IBM 3270s and the like) it had in Windows 3.x / 9x / ME.
The Windows SAK handler did offer an option to reboot, but its primary purpose was to present the logon UI. Using a SAK for that purpose had been considered a good security practice for years, since it prevents unprivileged applications from spoofing the logon (aka login, etc) prompt. Some UNIX variants (e.g. AIX, at least from 3.1) supported it as an option on the tty stack, but IME it was rarely used there.
....having used windows from win 3.1 'til win 7 inc all the server versions, I think I've only had about 8 BSODs in all that time. 1 on a NT4 server, 2 on my win 7 laptop after that update screw up a couple of weeks ago and at least 5 or more on a day from hell when I had to use Lotus Notes on a win 2000 workstation... Not saying anything but thank god IBM didn't control 90% of the planet's computers.
--Nerd Alert--
It depends what plugins are crowbarring their way into Lotus Notes, every AV with Lotus Notes monitor I ever saw managed to make it far more unstable and a nightmare when changing AV products (As Notes.ini can't be amended externally when its open).
Without the only issue I ever saw was users not using Ctrl - Break to stop whichever agent had got itself into a mess on the .nsf program (If you can call it that) being used.
--End Nerd--
Also if you want BSOD's run Windows ME with 128MB of ram
Or Tandy TRS-80 level 1 BASIC of which "The only error messages were: "WHAT?" for syntax errors, "HOW?" for arithmetic errors such as division by zero, and "SORRY" for out of memory errors."
Quoted from wikipedia since I really prefer to forget those days.
I still have my Amiga 1200 and 500 ;-)
Or Tandy TRS-80 level 1 BASIC of which "The only error messages were: "WHAT?" for syntax errors, "HOW?" for arithmetic errors such as division by zero, and "SORRY" for out of memory errors."
They really needed to add a "WHY?". It could be displayed whenever the machine was feeling recalcitrant. More languages should take their cues from INTERCAL.
Acorn demonstrated their ABC systems in Olympia (late 1980's?), I had a chance to have a play (IIRC it booted to a text prompt) I quickly managed to get it to report "Can't" and then it came up with "Won't" I half expected the next error to be "Shan't" and hear the sound of a child stamping their feet.
I was thumbing through some Honeywell comms code and noticed a comment following an operating system call: "Error at this point too horrible to contemplate". It then had no error handling code whatsoever, but just carried on!!
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Well, it's an improvement on:
"BDOS error on Drive B:" from CP/M
Other all time great errors messages on different OS's:
Code 0 = Power not on.
Atari 400/800 manual of error codes.
Universe does not exist
UNIX
Guru Meditation
Amiga OS 1.2-1.3
Bombs - literally picture of bombs with no documentation whatsoever!
ATARI ST TOS
DOES NOT COMPUTE
Actually comes from COBOL but passed into legend
Keyboard not found. Hit F1 to continue.
IBM PC BIOS
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