Origin of BSOD Saturday, February 21, 2004

Do you know the origin of term BSOD aka “Blue Screen of Death”? Well, the term “Blue Screen of Death” was not the original acronym for BSOD. The original term meant the “Black Screen of Death” and was seen when running under Windows 3.0. A user would attempt to run a DOS application and instead of the DOS application running, the entire screen would turn black with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner of the screen. The system was hung and would need to be rebooted. So, that is the what, what about the when and the where. The term came from ..........are you ready.........Coca-Cola in Atlanta, GA. Coca-Cola IT was trying to roll out Windows 3.0 within the Global Marketing group. When the users would try and run WordPerfect, sometimes, the user would get the BSOD. This occurred in the summer of 1991. I went out to Novell in 1994, I think, and the Novell developers wanted to meet me because they wanted to know about my boss, a man named Ed Brown. Well, the Novell developers asked me a lot of questions about Ed. I finally asked why, and they said that they wanted to know about the guy that coined the term BSOD. Apparently, he was famous within Novell because he would just scream about the BSOD and nobody at Novell knew what he was talking about for the longest time.....................

Wally