May 15, 2003

Black Screen of Death

n.

[prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far Side cartoon.] A failure mode of Microsloth Windows. On an attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold boot to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death. See also Blue Screen of Death, which has become rather more common.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:57 AM

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