TIL During a presentation of Windows 98 beta by Bill Gates in 1998, the demo PC crashed with a blue screen of death when his assistant plugged in a scanner to d... (opens in new tab)

The blue screen of death (BSoD) – or blue screen error, blue screen, fatal error, bugcheck, and officially known as a stop error[1][2][3] – is a critical error screen displayed by many iterations of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is used to indicate a system crash, in which the operating system reaches a critical condition where it can no longer operate safely. Its name comes from the blue colored background used predominately on the error screens found in the majority of Windows re...