The blue screen of Windows, called by some of death, for what it means for the computer when we are forced to restart it, has been with us for many years. The official presentation of this screen took place at the Windows 98 presentation event, by Bill Gates himself when he wanted to show one of his Principal functions.
It’s about the function plug and play, a function that allows any device to be connected to a Windows computer and for it to be able to recognize and automatically install the necessary drivers to make it work. At first everything seemed fine, the scanner was connected to demonstrate its operation, Windows 98 recognized that a device had been connected and started installing the necessary drivers. However, before finishing the process, the blue screen was displayed, a blue screen that caused the applause from the public.
Bill Gates was accompanied by Chris Capossela, who is currently executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Microsoft, but at the time was merely an assistant to Gates during the presentation. While Chris was at a loss for what to say, Bill Gates smiled as he said “This must be why Windows 98 isn’t out yet.”
This event, as we have mentioned above, was held at the COMDEX fair, a computer fair that ceased to be held in 2003. Windows 98 was released in June 1998.. Since date, the blue screen of death has continued to be with us over the years and is still present in Windows 11.
What is Windows Blue Screen of Death?
The blue screen of death, created by Steve Ballmer long before Gates was replaced as CEO of Microsoft, is displayed when the system is unable to recover from a system error, where the only possible solution is to restart the computer and return to start from scratch. This screen is usually displayed when the system finds a conflict with the hardware connected to the computer, the first thing to do is to disconnect each and every one of the peripherals.
If it continues to show up, after disconnecting all the peripherals, we must also analyze the internal components of the PC to check if the cause of the problem can be found in memory, hard drive, graphics card and other errors. Usually, this problem is solved by updating the operating system as well as the applications that manage the peripherals and components of the system.
Over the years, the blue screen has evolved from the first version that they were already displayed in Windows 1.0 to provide as much information as possible to help find the problem.
