Screens of Death Humor

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) once again made an epic appearance. This time, it happened at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Although the Beijing blunder is hard to beat, this is not the first instance that this notorious Windows operating system critical error screen appeared in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other famous appearance of BSOD happened when Bill Gates himself demoed Windows 98 on CNN (see video below).

The Screen of Death is not exclusive to Windows. Other operating systems also display special types of error messages when fatal exception occurs. Apple's Mac OS X is known to display the Gray Screen of Death, or as others call it "The Gray Screen of Panic and Disarray":

There’s also the "Sad Mac" that appears on older-generation of Macintosh computers and iPods:

Early versions of the Commodore Amiga computer are known to display a screen of death message called “Guru Meditation Error”: The term was an in-house joke from Amiga's early days:

In Linux, when an internal fatal error occurs (better known as "kernel panic"), it displays an error message in white text and black background. A 'Linux kernel oops' which can happen before a kernel panic also produces a certain error log. Here's a screenshot of a kernel oops:

In case you didn't know, there's also a Red Screen of Death...

Green Screen of Death...

White Screen of Death…

and Purple Screen of Death…