The dreaded BSOD on Windows 9x and the less common (but more
disastrous) blue screen on 2000 and XP show white type on a blue
background. I'm assuming this is basic VGA text mode, and I guess the
color scheme is a default. But why blue? And why do crashes revert to
this mode? Is this color scheme some throwback to earlier programming
convention? Or was the blue picked specifically to soothe angry users?

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Request for Question Clarification by mathtalk-ga on 16 Feb 2004 18:05 PST

Hi, zpatch-ga:

You are on the right track here, I think, in suspecting that the blue
color text mode is a throwback.  Actually the 80x25 character display
with varying foreground and background colors was available with CGA
adapters.  In DOS this would be set by the command "MODE CO80".

You've already gotten some good Comments.  I think I could add a bit
of history and an opinion not yet brought out on this thread, but one
which would probably not surprise you, given some of your other
Questions.  I'd be glad to post an Answer in that vein if you'd like
it.

regards, mathtalk-ga

Hi zpatch,

Couldn't find the reason the BSOD is blue, but I found these tidbits:

?Black Screen of Death is an ancestor of Blue Screen of Death. It was
developed in the DOS environment?
Blue Screen of Death.org
http://bsod.org/faqen.php

Microsoft?s plans for the BSOD  ;-) 
http://bbspot.com/News/2002/10/bsod_ads.html

The Wikipedia says: ?By default, the display is white (CGA color 0x0F;
HTML color #FFFFFF) lettering on a blue (EGA color 0x01; HTML color
#0000AA) background, with information about current memory values and
register values. Demonstrating a sense of humor, Microsoft has added a
utility that allows the user to change a setting in system.ini that
controls the colors that the BSoD code uses to any of the 16 CGA
colors.?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death

More about the customizable BSOD:
http://www.bueche.ch/comp/ms/bsod.html

Regards,
crabcakes-ga

I suspect that the blue is totally arbitrary. I used to be an avid
user of Commodore's Amiga computers. When the Amiga crashed, the
screen went dead black, with orange lettering at the top which
provided an error number which was rather whimsically called a "Guru
Meditation Number."

Here's an example:

http://www.karamelli.com/kuvin/data/guru.jpg

Reading this question dredges up some very repressed memories from the
mid-80's, when I finally succumbed to the dark side, and moved from an
Apple II+ to a 286-based IBM-compatible PC. Good 'ol MS-DOS 3.0.
Feeling like the king of the world because I had a whopping one
megabyte of RAM, and a beta copy of Windows 1.0 to play with (and
crash my computer with). Wondering why anyone would ever want to waste
their computer's power on what was essentially a glorified text
interface, when a CGA/EGA text interface was more than good enough to
keep my BBS dialin' days full of entertainment. Now you understand why
these are very repressed memories. :)

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to is that a blue background is
simply the next available color choice after the basic black that was
the de facto view in good ol' MS-DOS. As crabcakes pointed out in the
Wikipedia quote, and as seen on this page:

http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc2/v8/vic8.htm

blue is 0x01 (black being 0x00). While the background color could be
set to any of the 16 available colors in the CGA palette, convention
had it that only the non-bright colors were used for background
colors, so that the bright colors could be used by foreground text.
The brightest of these being Bright White, 0x0F. So, as pinkfreud
mentioned, there's a very high likelihood that the combination was
chosen arbitrarily.

At the same time, as you yourself mention in your question, there's a
good chance that the arbitrary choice was influenced in part by the
reactions that the alternatives would elicit. A green screen for an
error report? Green means go to most people, so that one wouldn't have
worked. Dark red would have just looked evil. Cyan might have worked,
but it does not provide as good a contrast or readability with Bright
White as Blue does. Thinking back, I seem to recall that it was
similar reasoning that led WordPerfect to use a blue background with
grey text as their default setting for readability.

My two cents,

aht-ga
Google Answer Researcher

Default Windows backgrounds when Windows is operating happily have
pretty much always been blue. While users do change their backgrounds,
the blue may well have been chosen simply for its consistency with
what Windows most often looks like when it is operating normally.

I would like to add that all the comments above have an implied
concept.  If the screen goes black, especially when there is no text,
you do not know if things are plugged in and operating.  By having
SOMETHING appear on the screen, you know at least that the computer
and monitor are working.

I'd say using bright colors like red and yellow hurts the eyes big
time. Blue is cooler to the eye. Offhand remark here.