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Bill Gates, Windows 98, Blue Screen of Death

failednation0 HN recommenders · 2019–2026
1.7M views · other · evergreen · Uploaded 2008-08-15

A very short clip of Bill Gates hitting a Blue Screen of Death while demonstrating plug and play on Windows 98 on stage.

HN cites it as the classic demo failure, in threads about USB, plug and play, and Microsoft's shipping quality.

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4 comments from Hacker News

@ulfw2019 · in “A German word for:“It only works when I try to show you how it does not work”?”

That translation is wrong. It’s almost the opposite. Vorführeffekt is when you are trying to show something works (for example to an audience/in a presentation) and it does NOT work in said presentation. Remember this oldie but goldie for USB Plug and Play on Windows? [VIDEO] PS: thanks for all the comments! Didn't realise the double negation would work too. (Trying to show a bug you found in a meeting/to an audience but then it turns out it actually behaves unexpectedly as originally intended. No bug.)

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@rasz2021 · in “The Confusing World of USB”

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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@esafak2023 · in “Dave Cutler: The Secret History of Microsoft Windows [video]”

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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@sublinear2026 · in “Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight”

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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