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Comment on Windows 3.1 saves the day during CrowdStrike outage — Southwest Airlines scrapes by with archaic OS

EleventhHour@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Windows 3.1 didn’t have the BSOD. It just froze. I remember with Windows NT 4, when we first got the BSOD, being so grateful that Microsoft decided to actually tell us that our computer wasn’t going to recover from the error. Otherwise, we’d just be sitting there, waiting, hoping it would unfreeze itself.

It never did

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TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I think that NT 3.51 had a blue screen of death

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fury@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Windows 3.1 did have a BSOD. It wasn’t always fatal, you could try to hit enter to go back to Windows, but most of the time it wasn’t really recoverable, Windows often wouldn’t work right afterwards.

I ran into them all the time in 3.11 on our 486 which had some faulty RAM (the BSOD would even be scrambled). If we could get back to Windows after that, it’d just be in a zombie state where moving the mouse around would paint stuff over whatever was left on screen, and wouldn’t respond to clicks or keypresses.

Fun times.

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- 5redie8@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  IIRC Windows 95 did that as well
  
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JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Are you sure? I remember a long time ago being able to trigger a BSOD by opening Windows Calculator and dividing any number by 0.

In fact, I remember being able to change the color of the BSOD.

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- EleventhHour@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  As another user mentioned, the BSOD first came in Windows NT 3.51.
  
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  - Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    The other user is wrong. I clearly remember the BSoD in Windows 3.1. You can find it easily with a simple web search. Here it is.
    
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Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Windows 3.1 absolutely did have a BSoD, and as the other person mentioned, sometimes you could press a key and the OS would recover. More often than not you needed to reboot, though. Our family PC would BSoD all the damn time, and I had to put up with it throughout a good portion of my early childhood until my dad finally bought a Windows 98 SE PC. But that OS also had its fair share of instability issues. The “illegal operation” error message was a near-daily occurance.

It wasn’t until we got our first NT-based machine (XP) that we stopped having constant issues with Windows. The DOS-based Windows OSes were notoriously unstable.

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Petter1@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
😄it still do that on my over 20y old 2gig RAM Arch KDE on wayland macBookPro 🤔

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