It was named after its inventor.

A Short History of the Blue Screen of Death

It might be a tricky thing to track down. Dave Plummer says that he never heard the "of death" part while working at Microsoft and it originated somewhere out on the Internet... his video is good if you want to know "why Blue?" though.

Why does this have a close vote for focus. It asks only one question, where does the term blue screen of death originate from?

There’s loads of trivia, and you can find a lot by reading Raymond Chen’s posts on the topic. I don’t remember ever reading about who coined the term however...

It rolls off the tongue far better than "Kernel panic of Death"...

Related: Which came first? "blue screen of death?" or the MacOS "spinning wheel of death?"

I'd hazard that the "blue screen" part of it was coined by the first person who noticed it was blue, and "of death" because the OS is no longer alive.

@SolomonSlow Well, given that the BSOD was introduced with Windows NT and 95, while very few people would have used NeXTSTEP, and macOS X Server 1.0, being the first OSX, came out in 1999, I'd say the BSOD probably was coined first. That said, it is possible... though NeXTSTEP 1.x's spinner from 1989 was monochrome and much more visibly intended to be a magneto-optical disk. Even the color 1990 NeXTSTEP 2.x one looks more like a disk than a pinwheel. I think the Pinwheel look was part of the gumdrop refresh done in macOS 10.2 but don't quote me on that.

We have become so used to Windows 10 being very stable, that this is fortunately a thing of the past. In the bad old days graphics drivers were very often the culprit as they ran with super powers.

In my particular bad old days, my drivers were very often the culprit :-( (We were developing a kernel-resident distributed file system on NT without much supporting documentation)

This question made me feel old and I'm not even 30 yet.

@wha7ever we did have some good times in computing over the years.

Hey, why is this in Retro Computing? The BSOD is alive and well in MS Windows in 2022!

>The first blue screen of death appeared in Windows NT 3.1[3] (the first version of the Windows NT family, released in 1993) and all Windows operating systems released afterwards. In its earliest version, the error started with ***STOP:. Hence, it became known as a "stop error."

You didn't usually get to see a BSoD more than once if it wasn't an NTFS file system. If it happened in W95, that pretty much meant HDD corruption on top of w/e the actual problem was, and then just fail to boot. In NT, HDD corruption was less because of the file system, but no computer ever likes having to tell itself to hard lock.

I'd guess that you are under 35 years old :-).

@stanri I feel your pain!

I'm ... proud??? ... to be the owner of a belt upon which buckle resides a small image of an actual BSOD screen.

My recollections from that time is that it originated on the Usenet forums. I couldn't tell you exactly who or when though. But I certainly heard it there before I ever saw it in print.