Dave Plummer

which is all wildly inappropriate in the workplace today, but it's all the content we had until we got actually, we had them put a satellite dish on the roof, a DSS, whatever the 18-inch dish is, because we couldn't get cable to the building.

And so we built up this thing that would eventually look a lot like Media Center, and it was distance viewing UI for Windows, so you could sit with a remote control on a desktop and have, you know, the current start menu is not great at 20 feet away, so.

What it is, is when Windows has no other option, when the kernel gets into a state where something illegal has happened, so let's say a device driver is trying to write to a piece of memory it doesn't own, or it's trying to free a piece of memory twice, something that just cannot happen and the kernel has no other option, it will shut the machine down to save your work.

Well, not save it, prevent further damage.

And it puts up a blue screen and it prints out the stack information, depending on how your settings are.

Sometimes it's just a sad face in the current Windows.

So Windows 3 had a blue screen, but it's completely unrelated to the blue screen in Windows NT.

And I talked to the guy that wrote the blue screen in Windows NT.

His name's John Vert.

And the reason he picked white on blue, I had thought, I'd always heard, because in the labs, you could walk through a lab where we have 50 PCs all running stress.

Oh, that one's got a blue screen.

It's crashed.

It wasn't that simple.

It was just the MIPS firmware that he was building it on was blue on white.

And Visual Slick Edit that he was using as an editor was also the same color scheme.

And so you could code, boot, crash, and reboot all in the same color scheme.

I think there's two major things that happen with computers as you run them over time.

One is memory gets used and not freed.

Yeah.

And so it accumulates on the heap or in the swap file or wherever, and things get sluggish.