Just for fun: Slickedit involved in origin of Blue Screen Of Death

[Reeky]

A little Friday-night distraction -- why is the Windows Blue Screen of Death blue???
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And the blue? "Put simply, because John's dev machine was a MIPS RISC box, and the firmware on that machine was white on blue.
"And in fact, his favourite editor at the time [mid-1990s] was SlickEdit, and the default text colours for SlickEdit were also white on blue.
"You could boot, code, and crash all in the same colour scheme: white on blue."
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I love that last line: boot, code and crash all in the same color...efficiency!

From the snarky UK tech site "The Register" at https: //www.theregister.com/2021/02/02/windows_blue_screen/

[Dan]

Yes.  The architect on Windows NT (remember when they were different) wanted SlickEdit.  So they had Clark go to Redmond and port textmode SlickEdit to NT, making it the first commercially available 32-bit Windows product.

[Clark]

When I started the port, there was just a single full screen terminal session which barely worked. This port was done way before Windows NT shipped. Dave Cutler is an interesting guy. At the time, he told me that RISC/ARM architectures were going to take over (beat the pants off Intel). Obviously, that didn't happen. The MIPS and Alpha machines failed miserably. However, now  Apple has come out with their M1 ARM chips that are looking very impressive. We are working very hard on a native port of SlickEdit to the M1 chip.

[Dan]

There's another Clark/Windows story that doesn't age as well as the BSOD that involves when Windows 95 first came out and there was the (new) taskbar.  At the time, SlickEdit had a window at coordinates off the screen.

When we shipped the next version of SlickEdit, two windows would appear at the task bar.  It turned out that somebody at Microsoft coded around the window SlickEdit had off the screen - at the original coordinates.  Clark moved the window, and it showed up as a blank item (I think) on the taskbar.