A company that has been around as long as Microsoft will undoubtedly have a history of presentations that go so far off track that they end up somewhere in the next county over. You’ve got Steve Ballmer shouting “DEVELOPERS!!!“, sweating through his shirt, Don Mattrick sinking the Xbox One before he even set sail, and so on and so forth. But I hold a special place in my heart when Bill Gates took the stage at the height of his powers to show off Windows 98, fresh off the world-changing but notoriously buggy Windows 95, and watched it crash midway through the demo.
The moment captured above took place during Gates’ speech at the then-major COMDEX trade show, a few months before the release of Windows 98. Microsoft’s Chris Capossela was in the process of demonstrating an innovative feature – plug-and-play USB support – by connecting a scanner, which prompted Windows 98 to download drivers. Then, boom: blue screen of death.
Gates takes it in stride and jokes, “That’s probably why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet,” but I’ve always thought someone he was later chewed out for the accident. It turned out that this moment had an even bigger impact on Microsoft than I expected, literally changing plans to build a facility called Microsoft Production Studios on the Redmond campus.
Microsoft’s in-house film and TV studio “was being designed just as Windows 98’s infamous USB blue screen was coming on the scene,” Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen recently said. he reported on his blog. “They modified their design to include a room next to the broadcast room to display all the computer equipment that will be used during the live broadcast. The equipment will be set up and tested before being handed over to the hosts of the show.”
Sounds like a pretty basic procedure, right? But Chen did this was also written about why Windows 98 unexpectedly crashed on stage that day and why the testing process for the presentation wasn’t always perfectly velvety.
Although the Windows development team “had a scanner that they had tested and validated in the lab… the demo team did not use this scanner. Instead, the demo team went to a local electronics store and purchased a scanner off the shelf,” he wrote. In low, this particular scanner was trying to draw more power from the USB port than it should, which was a bug that the development team had yet to address. Enter BSOD.
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