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Windows 8 has just been unveiled by Microsoft at its BUILD conference in Anaheim, California. But the question on all of our lips has been: "What does the new Blue Screen of Death look like?"
Well, thanks to Chip Hazard, we now know. Windows 8's BSOD has a big ol' sadface emoticon front and centre, along with the text: "Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn't handle, and now it needs to restart."
The BSOD has a long and storied history. It first showed up in 1985 in Windows 1.0, and consisted of random symbols against a blue background. The first useful BSOD arrived with Windows 3.x, and remained through Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. It had a centred error message that indicated the nature of the fault, be that during the start-up or due to a driver error.
It famously popped up during a demo of Windows 98 by Bill Gates, when a scanner was connected to demonstrate Plug and Play. The crowd cheered, and Gates replied "That must be... er... that must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet!"
In Windows NT-based operating systems, like Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows 7, the error text moved to the upper-left corner, and was given a number that users could provide to a software engineer (or Google) to try and track down exactly what was causing the problem.
In Windows 8, the BSOD has gone back in the other direction -- reducing the amount of technical information offered, leaving a small indication below the error message as to what's gone wrong.
On the bright side, it's a little more user friendly, and it definitely bears the influence of the large amounts of time spent by web designers on their 404 – Page Not Found pages.
Is the removal of useful problem identification text in favor of a more user-friendly message worth the trade-off? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK