Retrowindows-3-1steve-ballmerraymond-chenctrl-alt-delmicrosoft-historyblue-screen
Steve Ballmer Wrote the Words on Windows 3.1's Ctrl+Alt+Del Screen, and They Shipped Almost Word for Word
Raymond Chen says Ballmer, then head of Microsoft's Systems Division, told the Windows team he didn't like the Ctrl+Alt+Del message, emailed his own version a few days later, and it went into Windows 3.1 pretty much as he wrote it.
At the time, Ballmer ran Microsoft’s Systems Division. He dropped in on the Windows team to see what they were working on, and they showed him the new Ctrl+Alt+Del feature.
He nodded and said, per Chen: “This is nice, but I don’t like the text of the message. It doesn’t sound right to me.”
The team’s answer was, roughly, have at it. “Okay, Steve. If you think you can do a better job, then go for it.” He did. A few days later his version arrived by email, and Chen’s verdict is that “The text he came up with was actually quite good.”
Here’s the screen you got when a Windows 3.1 program froze and you pressed the keys:
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.
Getting to that screen took real work under the hood. In a follow-up post, Chen walks through what Windows 3.1 did when you pressed the keys. A driver called the virtual reboot device cleared a flag, waited three quarters of a second (“Why ¾ seconds? I have no idea.”), and checked whether the 16-bit scheduler had run since. Depending on what it found, you got one of several different screens, and only one of them was Ballmer’s.
When you pressed Enter on his, the kernel ended the stuck program by making the same exit call a program makes when it quits on its own. “Everything looks like the application simply decided to exit normally.”
| Blue screen | Who wrote it | Year, per Chen |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 3.1 Ctrl+Alt+Del | Steve Ballmer (the text) | 1992 |
| Windows NT kernel error | John Vert | 1993 |
| Windows 95 kernel error | Raymond Chen (final form) | 1995 |
An executive rewriting the error dialog sounds like the setup for a horror story. This one went the other way: his three bullets told you what each key did and what each choice would cost you. Error messages tend to get better when someone outside the team reads them cold, because the team already knows what the message means. What Chen never said is what the team’s original wording was, the version Ballmer said “doesn’t sound right.”