Goth aesthetic gone wild: a user's self-inflicted black screen of non-death in Windows 3.1’s

Labeled in black on black - controls for a galactic hyper-hearse or ill-advised Windows theme? 

Microsoft senior software engineer Raymond Chen has explained what Windows is doing when you hold down the power button, and shared a story about the time a customer accidentally created a Goth Mode for Windows 3.1.

There's a section in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (actually, page 116 of this writer's dog-eared copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) in which Zaphod Beeblebrox observes of a ship's interior: "Every time you operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it."

The same turned out to be true of a user who called Microsoft customer support to complain that after Windows 3.1 booted up, all that remained after the product logo disappeared was a blank screen.

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It turned out the customer liked black a little too much and, according to Chen, made themself a Goth theme.

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The customer support engineer on Microsoft's end pieced it together. The customer had, according to Chen, "set the wallpaper color to black. They set the title bar color to black. They set the button color to black. They set the window background color to black. They set the window text color to black.

"Every possible color you could pick in the Colors control panel was set to black."

We suspect the mouse pointer, at least, would have stuck around, unless the customer had also managed to change some settings around this. And then there are the icons… However, Windows 3.1 was a long time ago, and this writer's attempts at theming then were the consequences of growing up in the '70s and '80s, which resulted in some interesting neon, orange, and brown combinations.

As for Goth mode, Chen said, "Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out because you can't see anything." One solution he suggested was deleting the [colors] section from the win.ini file.

Chen told the anecdote as a coda to the question – what exactly is modern Windows doing when you hold down the power button on a PC? According to Chen, after eight seconds of holding the power button, the Windows kernel realizes a forced power-off is happening and tries to take a kernel dump for diagnostics.

He explained that the kernel dumps were classified by Microsoft as "long power button hold" (LPBH) failures, with one of the bits of information captured indicating if all the pixels on the screen were black. The video driver might therefore be the culprit. Or whatever was responsible for drawing to the screen.

Today's Windows struggles with dark mode. But in the dim, distant past, every pixel being black might mean the user was either Hotblack Desiato or had done something very silly indeed. ®