Was the blue screen of death ever just a blue screen?

Official term for blue screen of death

Wikipedia gives the official name in the Windows NT family as a Stop error, and as "bug checks" in development documentation, and that:

BSoDs have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1.

Wikipedia also claims without citation:

The term "Blue Screen of Death" originated during OS/2 pre-release development activities at Lattice Inc, the makers of an early Windows and OS/2 C compiler. During porting of Lattice's other tools, developers encountered the stop screen when null pointers were dereferenced either in application code or when unexpectedly passed into system API calls. During reviews of progress and feedback to IBM Austin, the developers described the stop screen as the Blue Screen of Death to denote the screen and the finality of the experience.[citation needed]

blue screen of death

The OED has the phrase "blue screen of death" from 1994, but I found an example from 10 October 1993 in Usenet:

After a successful installation, I proceeded to add TCP/IP, FTP server, and Services for Macintosh. NTAS would reach the login dialog, then die the blue screen death. After some experimentation, I determined that Services for Macintosh was conflicting with the 3COM Elnk16 ethernet card.

...

The only remaining problem is--NT still locks up the machine at exactly the same point. The only difference is that I don't get the blue screen of death--NT just freezes.

Dave Taylor, "NT Patch--doesn't fix Services for Macintosh", comp.os.ms-windows.nt.setup

The first version of Windows NT was released in July 1993.

BSoD

The blue screen of death is often abbreviated to BSoD (or BSOD).

But before Windows had the blue screen of death, BSoD referred to the black screen of death. The earliest Windows BSoD I found is from 7 Sep 1993 in bit.listserv.novell, by Douglas Scott

Subject: Re: Windows and the "Black Screen O' Death":

Start Windows run a few windows apps, start a dos shell and Black Screen of death often results. (Text mode screen with flashing cursor in top left.) In particular if Word for Windows 2.0a is run and a file opened then command.com run BSOD is guaranteed.

black screen of death

And black screen of death goes back to at least the 12 April 1993 issue of Infoworld (p.102, Notes From the Field) by Robert X. Cringely:

Headline: "If you ask nicely, Barney and Ray will cure your Black Screen of Death"

The kids in Redmond last week finally acknowledged to me the existence of the Black Screen of Death, which afflicts networked PCs runnig Windows 3.1.

...

So one company's panacea could be another's nightmare, causing more problems even than the Black Screen.

...

With Win 3.1 so pervasive, Microsoft's problem has become everyone's problem, which explains why at least one NetWare was able to get a Black Screen of Death fix from Novell.

• There existed other blue screens that were not of death

• Original developers just called them blue screens

  The phrase "blue screen of death" was generally attributed to the blue screen fatal error message of Windows NT. In Windows 95, we just called them "blue screen messages", without the "of death".

Microsoft may not have a great record when it comes to devising catchy names for its products and features (Clippy the animated paper clip and Microsoft Bob the operating system excepted, of course), but the company certainly wasn't eager to have a fatal operating system error become popularly known as a "Blue Screen of Death." In fact, several early third-party discussions of the phenomenon note that Microsoft called it simply a "Stop screen." From Shane Stigler & Mark Lisenbardt, 1001 MCSE Tips (1998) [combined snippets]:

When a Windows NT computer encounters a fatal system error, the system will generate a blue screen, called a Stop screen (also called "the blue screen of death"), with debugging information. If you have configured your Windows NT system to do so, the system will write the contents of physical memory to a file for future examination. ...

A Stop screen contains five sections, each with its own unique purpose. The Stop screen's first section contains the debug port status indicators, which will appear if you have connected a null-modem cable to the system (to obtain debugging information about the system) and you have set the debug parameter in the boot.ini file.

The next section is the bugcheck information section, which contains the error code after the word Stop. An application developer can specify up to four parameters in the bugcheck information section to help an administrator debug the Windows NT system.

The earliest instance of the phrase that a Google Books search finds is in Michael Hyman, PC Roadkill (1995):

The background of such windows is blue, leading to the name "blue screen" or "blue screen of death." You can use this as a verb, as in, "I blue-screened NT this morning." While blue screens are rare, they are alarming when they occur. Usually they contain a message suggesting how to resolve the problem. One NT blue screen apparently says: "Reboot your machine. Do not reboot your machine."