Black Screen of Death

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The Jargon File Parts of this article are based on the Jargon File, v. 4.4.7, a public domain document of hacker jargon.

Black Screen of Death: prob. 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.

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