Mac Screens of Death History and Why Computers Crash

- Greetings, Internet.

I am Ken from the Computer Clan,

and today I'm going to sho--

Sorry.

Just had to reboot there for a second.

Anyway, I want to show you guys today the Mac screens

of death, how they changed throughout time,

and how they work and what you might be doing

to trigger them.

Let's take a look at those right now.

So where to begin?

Well, why not with the rather iconic Sad Mac screen?

This graphic was introduced with the original Macintosh,

and you saw it on startup if there was some sort

of failure.

And it usually occurred with a crash sound.

Also known as the death chime.

Now you could actually trigger this yourself

by booting up a classic Macintosh

and pressing the programmer's key

or, later known, as the interrupt key.

Command power button also triggers this.

This typically opens up the MacsBug console,

which is a debugging tool.

But if you tried to trigger this on startup,

you would see the Sad Mac and hear the death chime.

So next we have the Bomb Screen.

This was also introduced with the original Macintosh,

and it would occur due to a general System Error.

We'll talk more about those in a little bit.

But if the system had a problem

and it couldn't continue running,

you would get this Bomb Screen.

And there was a restart button.

You could click it, and if you're lucky,

the system would actually reboot by itself.

But not always.

Those were the common error messages you would see

in the classic macOS for a long time,