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Who Wrote the Blue Screens of Death
- sickblastoise 2y agoFunny 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=41363 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=41...
- omnibrain 2y agoThe 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.
- narski 2y agoYeah, 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)
- kjellsbells 2y agoOne 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.
- rustcleaner 2y agoI 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!
- rustcleaner 2y agoDissenter must be revived somehow. Narratives are the 21st century theater of war and right now infrastructure is winning.
- jasomill 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20040514091226/http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/24/45779.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20040514091226/http://blogs.msdn...
- rawgabbit 2y agoWhat 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.
- D-Coder 2y ago"You will lose any unsaved information in all applications."
- amy-petrik-214 2y agoI believe it was BeOS who if not first then most famously embrace haiku error out messages : https://gist.github.com/benjaminoakes/e58a9ddb0ead8eefbbae40476d87cdf0 https://gist.github.com/benjaminoakes/e58a9ddb0ead8eefbbae40... e.g. Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers. Login incorrect. Only perfect spellers may Enter the system.
- par 2y agoAs soon as I saw the author was Raymond Chen, I immediately knew I was in for some true BSOD lore.
- diggan 2y agoBut 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?
- quercusa 2y agoBut now it has a QR code!
- cainxinth 2y agoBallmer personally wrote the Win 3.1 BSOD... Who knew?
- amelius 2y agoLike, could they have made the UX any worse?
- wumeow 2y agoYes, they added a frowny face and less information.
- 13of40 2y agoIt'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.
- Hnrobert42 2y agoMy 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.
- Ekaros 2y agoOn 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.
- legitster 2y agoI mean, if the computer has crashed not sure what a nicer UX is going to do.
- SeenNotHeard 2y agoMake a drunken sad face. https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Sad_Mac https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Sad_Mac
- greatNespresso 2y agoI 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.
- CommieBobDole 2y agoEvergreen: https://i.redd.it/bp22t4c46zk01.jpg https://i.redd.it/bp22t4c46zk01.jpg
- tivert 2y agoI 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.").
- hulitu 2y agoGoogle ? Unexpected error. /s
- francisofascii 2y agoWhat 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?
- kevingadd 2y agoIf 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.
- ofrzeta 2y agoJohn 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-Screen-of-Death https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-the-original-Windows-Blue...
- ComputerGuru 2y agoI must disapprove of the anachronistic usage of fonts in those blue screen renders!
- legitster 2y agoIf 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 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.
- indrora 2y agoOn the other hand, Plummer is an unreliable source.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoCare to elaborate?
- KTibow 2y agoNot 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.
- wdfx 2y agoHas 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?
- btilly 2y agoYes. 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.
- user112 2y agoFrom Dave's Garage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgqJJECQQH0&t=2s&ab_channel=Dave%27sGarage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgqJJECQQH0&t=2s&ab_channel=...