Yes, the iconic Windows error screen is undergoing changes almost 40 years after its debut in the first version of Windows. The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will now become the Black Screen of Death (BSOD).
This change follows other updates that Windows is making in the wake of the CrowdStrike breach last year, which affected 8.5 million Windows devices and caused businesses, airports, TV stations, and government services to go down.
In the wake of the CrowdStrike breach, Microsoft announced the Windows Resilience Initiative, which aims to build security features deeper into Windows to make a crisis like CrowdStrike less likely.
The initiative also tries to make unexpected reboots less disruptive. Windows is adding a quick machine recovery feature that helps computers get back online if a reboot fails. Windows shared the new “black screen of death” on its blog, but didn’t even acknowledge the cosmic shift it triggered. It simply called it a “simplified interface” because the blue background with white text was apparently too complicated.
Why change the blue screen to black at all? Did the viral images of Times Square that the BSOD rendered useless really do that much damage to the reputation?
We’ve known this cobalt-colored harbinger of trouble for a long time. When BSOD first appeared in Windows 1.0 in 1985, it was legal to smoke cigarettes on airplanes, Germany was two separate countries, HTML code hadn’t been created yet, and Mark Zuckerberg was a baby who probably hadn’t yet grasped the concept of object immutability.
But as time passes, we look back on the decades of fun and frustration we shared together, the ominous sapphire screen reflected in our eyes now as a sepia-toned memory.
