Guess Who Wrote Microsoft's 'Blue Screen of Death' The text from that infamous blue screen on Windows PCs was written by none other than ...
By Dave Smith
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
If you've ever used a Windows PC, you have most likely experienced the "Blue Screen of Death," which would show up when a program experienced a fatal error or became unresponsive. In later versions of Windows, you'd see this blue screen any time you pressed "Control-Alt-Delete."
Well, according to a blog post from Microsoft developer Raymond Chen, the text from that famous blue screen was written by none other than Steve Ballmer, the bombastic ex-CEO of Microsoft.
Chen says Ballmer was head of Microsoft's system division when he paid a visit to the Windows team. And when he saw Control-Alt-Delete and the original text for the Blue Screen of Death, he said, "This is nice, but I don't like the text of the message. It doesn't sound right to me."
According to Chen, someone from the Windows team challenged Ballmer to write a better message if he thought he could do a better job -- and he did. Chen says Ballmer's text "went into the product pretty much word for word."
Here is that text, courtesy of Chen:
