Bill Gates, Windows 98, Blue Screen of Death

What people said

sublinear · 2026-04 · Reference

I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98 and caused by a USB scanner. This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac. [VIDEO]

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esafak · 2023-10 · Criticism

Steve Jobs pushed individual contributors to perfect products before shipping them. Bill Gates had no taste to justify any sort of perfectionism, or any shame in shipping buggy products ( [VIDEO] ). It was all dollars and cents, as far as I can tell.

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rasz · 2021-01 · Reference

Love Fabien write-ups! > badly fragmented connector world made of Dont forget SCSI. USB killed external SCSI. >Up to that point in time, it was a good tech stack. USB 0.9 was 1995, USB 1.0 1996. Two years later we had Bill Gates getting embarrassed by Windows 98 BSOD on stage [VIDEO] . By ~2002 we ended up with 6 separate incompatible proprietary variations on micro USB. Pretty much every second Camera vendor had its won "standard". >USB-3.X cables features 8 wires .... and the other six carry data Sadly just adding even more confusion to the mix. 24 pins, up to 13 signals, 4 pairs (8 wires) dedicated to USB 3.2 alone. >Thanks to DP 1.4, the bandwidth requirement can be lowered via DSP lossless compression oh its very much lossy, Display Stream Compression (DSC) is "visually lossless" :--------) it works similar to Texture Compression, but works on blocks of lines instead of rectangles, still it does destroy information by cutting off color accuracy. At the end of the day USB is still trivial compared to Bluetooh.

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