Steve Ballmer Authored the Windows 3.1 Ctrl-Alt-Del Screen

Nerval's Lobster writes According to Microsoft developer Raymond Chen, Steve Ballmer didn't like the original text that accompanied the Ctrl-Alt-Del screen in Windows 3.1, so he wrote up a new version. If you used Windows at any point in the past two decades, you can thank him for that infuriatingly passive 'This Windows application has stopped responding to the system' message, accompanied by the offer to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete again to restart the PC (and lose all your unsaved data). Update: 09/09 15:30 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that Ballmer authored the Ctrl-Alt-Del screen, not the BSoD, as originally stated.

Comments

"Stuff that matters"

[Nimey]

This story belongs in idle.

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[sexconker]

Seriously. There's nothing to discuss.
Ballmer wrote the message. So what?

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[Killer Instinct]

Its a "advert" to drive hits to DICE.COM :/

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Ballmer wrote the message, and the message was quite good, Ballmer is a developer.........

From TFA

"Okay, Steve. If you think you can do a better job, then go for it." Unlike some other executive, Steve took up the challenge, and a few days later, he emailed what he thought the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen should say.

The text he came up with was actually quite good, and it went into the product pretty much word for word.

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[OzPeter]

Seriously. There's nothing to discuss.
Ballmer wrote the message. So what?

Bet you wouldn't say that if Bennet had posted this story. But the again it would have been a philosophical piece about how while he likes the color blue, its not his favorite color blue, and how he wished that all error display screens should be *his* favorite blue color, and how dare the manufacturers of all the different OS's not consult him and get *his* opinion on what makes for a really nice blue color, even though each of those OS manufactures have their own ideas as to how things should be done and they have most likely done their own research into colors, but anyway that should all be scrapped and re-implemented Bennett's way (at their own expense of course) and while their at it could they also make it so every program works exactly the same on every different combination of computer and OS as it's a major hassle having to learn how to do things differently whenever you site down at an unfamiliar computer, but then again why should computers be unfamiliar in the first place, maybe it would be better if they all had a dedicated "Bennet" login so that he would just be able to sit down at any computer and just use it the way he wanted to, in fact what would be even better if all that research into melding telepathy and machines was finally completed so that he wouldn't even have to sit down at a computer as it would simply recognize him from a distance and would then fire up its 3D holographic welcome display (which BTW is fully detailed 3D model of Bennett himself - on a pedestal) so that he can instantly get down to his .. Oh look! Squirrel!!

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[the_B0fh]

Oh, how I wish I have mod points right now. The article itself and this article are both worthless.

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[vux984]

Bet you wouldn't say that if Bennet had posted this story. But the again it would have been a philosophical piece about how while he likes the color blue, its not his favorite color blue, and how he wished that all error display screens should be *his* favorite blue color...

Awesome. Thanks for that. It almost makes having to suffer through Bennet's use of slashdot as his personal blog worth it, just to see it satirized like this. :)

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[mobby_6kl]

It's a minor piece of trivia that was certainly not worth posting on slashdot in lieu of another Raymond post, but it's something I would've enjoyed reading when going through his blog. Check it out, there's tons of interesting technical and historical information there.

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[gstoddart]

LOL ... that's it ... Bennet is essentially Gilderoy Lockhart!!

You, sir, are brilliant!

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[TWX]

Ballmer wrote the message. So what?

So now we know who to send the counseling bills to...

Re:"Stuff that matters"

[TheRaven64]

Agreed on Chen's blog, but the summary is horrible. This message hasn't been part of Windows since Windows 95 (which introduced preemptive multitasking to the Windows world, so a single application could no longer freeze the system trivially), so the odds are that if you used Windows in the last two decades you've never seen this notice...

Amiga

[Pheran]

Nothing will ever top "Guru Meditation" :)

Re:Amiga

[marcello_dl]

If a system can display an error message, it is not messed up enough.

Re:Amiga

[operagost]

I really think you are confused. This "blue screen" is the one that DOS-based Windows displayed when a program had stopped responding. If you were lucky, you could kill the program and save your work before memory was totally corrupted. In NT-based Windows, the system remains stable when one application hangs because of separate memory spaces. You can keep working after you kill the bad app. In either case, you lose whatever you were doing in the bad app, but in the latter, at least the system remains stable.

Re:Amiga

[Richard Dick Head]

You're comparing apples and oranges as far as the technical details. I'm saying Win 3.x let me continue when it saw problems, and NT could also do that.

I'd like to have the *option* to continue to save my work even if there was a chance of data corruption. For example, take the common NT blue screen IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. That fact that my buggy network driver tried to access paged memory in the wrong sequence is miles away from catastrophic. And it certainly doesn't take priority over something I've been working on for hours. IRQ 0 is me, motherfuckers!

Re:Amiga

[gargleblast]

If a system can display an error message, it is not messed up enough.

Yeah. A really good Amiga crash would randomly poke the graphics and sound chips and the machine would look and sound as if it were about to explode.

Re:Amiga

[Tablizer]

If a system can display an error message, it is not messed up enough.

There is an in-between. I once saw the error message:

ERROR: There is not enough memory to display the error m

old message

[alphatel]

I prefer the Windows 3.1 BSoD

Re:old message

[Opportunist]

So this is something you'd prefer?

I miss the BSOD

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I'd rather get some cryptic information about stop codes or an error message than a condescending sad face accompanied by a reboot request. At least I can look up the code and get a ballpark idea what the issue is without firing up windbg.

Re:I miss the BSOD

[DarkProphet]

That only works if you're able get to the machine to boot again :-(

Windows 8

[LookIntoTheFuture]

Well, at least it doesn't have a childish sad-face imoticon like the Windows 8 version.

Re:Windows 8

[war4peace]

People are resourceful.

Re:Windows 8

[bobbied]

And here I thought Metro was the BSOD... Silly me..

Re:Windows 8

[just_another_sean]

How the frog do you trigger a BSOD in Windows 8?

Apparently by installing updates.

Re:Windows 8

[reikae]

What's the rest of your hardware like? GTX 660 doesn't need anywhere close to 1 kW, I'm doing fine with a 450 W PSU (also powering an i5-2500 CPU and one hard drive). Seems more likely that your previous PSU was just a very low quality one.

Greetings from the someone-might-be-wrong-on-the-internet dept. :-)

Re:Windows 8

[snookiex]

A friend of mine told me recently that he got one by putting his laptop on hibernation while the peripherals were still connected. He disconnected them while in hibernation, and then woke the system up again.

Anthill Inside

[ackthpt]

+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++

It is the frequency not message

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Hung processes and the accompanying error messages are always iffy. Is it any worse than "core dumping" or "kernel mode panic"? What irritated most people was how often applications crashed.

Warning: Do Not Turn off this Jumbotron!

[Anonymous Coward]

Applying critical patch 42 of 13,699,364...

Hexidecimal

[tekrat]

Did he also decide to produce the Hex output that is entirely useless and without merit? I understand that's for debugging purposes, but who decided that was a good idea to leave in for a consumer-level OS? Seriously.

Re:Hexidecimal

[bloodhawk]

Did he also decide to produce the Hex output that is entirely useless and without merit? I understand that's for debugging purposes, but who decided that was a good idea to leave in for a consumer-level OS? Seriously.

WTF? of all the idiotic things they have done, leaving the debug information available in the consumer-level OS was one of the BEST ideas. It gives even the most clueless user a chance to google it, or read the screen to someone that understands it, or in the case of my mother send a photo of it so someone can look up what went wrong.

Re:Never seen it

[wbo]

That particular screen was used in Windows 3.1 which used cooperative multitasking. The message was displayed when an application stopped responding to messages for a period of time (indicating that the application may be hung for some reason and could be preventing other applications from getting any CPU time.

The screen allows the user to kill the offending application, allowing any other applications to continue to run (that is as long as the hung application hadn't corrupted the contents of RAM in some way).

Prevent damage to your computer

[inglorion_on_the_net]

Personally, I like the message that says "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." I wonder who came up with that one.

Re:Prevent damage to your computer

[captjc]

We're sorry, Someone threw a chair and smashed your Windows. Please press CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot.

Re:Bastard!

[Richy_T]

I'd rather know who wrote that stupid message that implied the user was responsible for Windows not being shut down properly when it was the festering pile of crap itself that fell over so I could drive all the way across the country and give them a slap.

I am sure many here will have a brief seething relapse when they see these words:

Because Windows was not properly shut down, one or more of your disk drives may have errors on it. To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down your computer by selecting Shut Down from the Start menu.

Re:That explains a lot

[just_another_sean]

Screenfulls of BS just confuse people.

It's not just BS to everyone though. And even without understanding what it was telling me by googling the stop codes I've been able to fix things based on good search results, especially for very common problems like driver errors. As another poster mentioned it's sometimes possible and a hundred times easier to search for a stop code and get a fix for a problem than it is to fire up WinDBG.

Re:Never liked the 'D' part of BSoD

[benjymouse]

BSOD happens when the kernel detects memory corruption. With a hybrid monolithic kernel like Windows that means all bets are off and continuing could very well case damage more damage.

Even if the memory corruption happens in an USB driver, it can overwrite critical kernel memory.

Incidentally, you *do* get more information. The kernel will initiate a kernel dump which can be investigated later.

Flying chairs

[mendax]

I think Windows 8, that perverse boot sector virus, ought to have updated the BSoD to show a video of Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across a room. No doubt he's done that a few times in his office as the BSoD popped up.

Re:Never seen it

[HornWumpus]

Windows 3.1 had protected memory, apps attempting to access memory the didn't own accounted for 90% of blue screens. Of those 90% were trying to access 0000:0000.

Also Windows 3.1 multitasking was more complicated then that. It had preemptive multitasking between DOS shells and Windows. But windows itself used MacOS style (cooperative) multitasking.

Also note: Windows 3.1 did way too much in kernel mode. So any driver could corrupt memory, but not apps in general.

Guru Meditation

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "Guru Meditation Error" originated as an in-house joke in Amiga's early days. The company had a product called the Joyboard, a game controller much like a joystick but operated by one's feet, similar to the modern-day Wii Balance Board. Early in the development of the Amiga computer operating system, the company's developers became so frustrated with the system's frequent crashes that, as a relaxation technique, a game developed where a person would sit cross-legged on the joyboard, resembling an Indian guru.[3] The player tried to remain extremely still; the winner of the game stayed still the longest. If the player moved too much, a "guru meditation" error occurred.[4] The final unlockable balance activity in Wii Fit represents a similar game. The same game is unlocked from the start in Wii Fit Plus.

- from Wikipedia -