Steve Ballmer Apparently Wrote The Blue Screen Of Death

Dave SmithSep 4, 2014, 20:20 IST

If you've ever used a Windows PC, you've likely experienced the "Blue Screen of Death," which would show up when a program experienced a fatal error, or became unresponsive. In later versions of Windows, you'd see this blue screen any time you pressed "Control-Alt-Delete." Well, according to a blog post from Microsoft developer Raymond Chen (via The Verge), the text from that famous blue screen was written by none other than Steve Ballmer, the bombastic ex-CEO of Microsoft. Chen says Ballmer was head of Microsoft's system division at the time when he paid a visit to the Windows team. And when he saw Control-Alt-Delete and the original text for the Blue Screen of Death, he said," This is nice, but I don't like the text of the message. It doesn't sound right to me." According to Chen, someone from the Windows team challenged Ballmer to write a better message if he thought he could do a better job - and he did. Chen says Ballmer's text "went into the product pretty much word for word." Here is that text, courtesy of Chen:

Contoso Deluxe Music Composer This Windows application has stopped responding to the system. * Press ESC to cancel and return to Windows. * Press ENTER to close this application that is not responding. You will lose any unsaved information in this application. * Press CTRL+ALT+DEL again to restart your computer. You will lose any unsaved information in all applications.

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Steve Ballmer Apparently Wrote The Blue Screen Of Death