A company that's been around as long as Microsoft will inevitably have a history of presentations that have gone so far off the rails they've ended up somewhere in the next county. You've got Steve Ballmer shouting "DEVELOPERS!!!" while sweating through his shirt, Don Mattrick sinking the Xbox One before it had even set sail, and on and on. But I hold a special place in my heart for the time Bill Gates went on stage at the height of his power to show off Windows 98, fresh from the world-changing but notoriously buggy Windows 95—and watched it crash mid-demo.
The moment, captured above, was from Gates' keynote at the then-major COMDEX trade show a few months before Windows 98's launch. Microsoft's Chris Capossela was in the middle of demonstrating a novel feature—plug-and-play USB support—by hooking up a scanner, prompting Windows 98 to download its drivers. Then, wham: Blue Screen of Death.
Gates takes it in stride, quipping "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet," but I always figured somebody got chewed out for the crash afterward. Turns out the moment made an even bigger impression internally at Microsoft than I guessed, literally changing the building plans for a facility called Microsoft Production Studios on the Redmond campus.
Microsoft's in-house film and broadcast studio "was being designed at the time of the infamous Windows 98 on-stage USB blue screen," veteran Microsoft employee Raymond Chen recently recounted on his blog. "They modified their design to include a room next to the broadcast room to stage any computer equipment that would be used during a live broadcast. The equipment would be set up and tested before being turned over to the program hosts."
Sounds like a pretty basic procedure, right? But Chen has also written about why Windows 98 unexpectedly crashed on stage that day, and the testing-to-presentation pipeline wasn't always perfectly smooth.
While the Windows development team "had a scanner that they had tested and validated in the lab… the demo team didn’t use that scanner. Instead, the demo team went to a local electronics store and bought a scanner off the shelf," he wrote. Long story short, that particular scanner tried to draw more power from the USB port than it was supposed to, which was an error the development team hadn't dealt with yet. Enter the BSOD.
Since the company was still designing Microsoft Production Studios, where it would go on to record future promotional videos and presentations, having proper testing space clearly became a priority. "They [didn't] want a repeat of the disaster of experiencing a blue screen error during a live broadcast," Chen wrote. "So far, it has worked."
Whatever happened to the scanner so powerful it embarrassed Bill Gates and got a whole room added to a multimillion dollar building? Well, according to another former Microsoft employee (and corroborated by Chen), the scanner "was mounted on a WW2 infantry helmet worn by [Brad Carpenter] to Windows War Rooms for the remainder of the product cycle."
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