Text "blue screen of death" wrote Steve Ballmer personally



Millions of people have experienced an incredible feeling to see on the computer screen the famous BSoD - Blue Screen of Death , «blue screen of death." But few know that the original text of the message personally wrote Steve Ballmer.

History remembered Raymond Chen (Raymond Chen), Microsoft developer and author of the blog The Old New Thing.

BSoD first implemented in the operating system Windows 3.X on the core 80386, which was able to work in the standard and the "advanced" mode (Enhanced Mode). The latter allows you to run multiple parallel 16-bit applications, allocating CPU time between them.

Another difference - a special challenge, with which it was possible to pick up the CPU time in any application.

Finally, the third difference extended mode was the same "Virtual Machine Manager", which appeared on the screen when you press Ctrl + Alt + Del. He also appears if the parallel operation of several applications for some of them refused to respond in time.

Manager shows the name of a frozen application and offers a choice of three options: close the program, restart your computer or exit the manager.

While Steve Ballmer headed the department operating systems (Systems Division). Once he went to Windows developers to see how they are doing. "He showed a new feature with the Ctrl + Alt + Del, Steve nodded thoughtfully and said," Everything is nice, but a strange message. I think he sounds wrong "».

"Okay, Steve, if you can do the job better, take for it", - the manager offered programmers. He accepted the challenge.

Several days later, Ballmer sent a letter with a new option for posts BSoD.

 Application Name This Windows application has stopped responding to the system. * Press ESC to cancel and return to Windows. * Press ENTER to close this application that is not responding. You will lose any unsaved information in this application. * Press CTRL + ALT + DEL again to restart your computer. You will lose any unsaved information in all applications.  Pre>  blockquote> Option perfectly acceptable, so that the text went into production without a single change, word for word. 

Other stories:
«Epic letter Bill Gates about usability Windows»
«Bill Gates: Ctrl + Alt + Del - it was a mistake»

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/235755/

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