[TheBattman]

While I am no MS fan, is Windows the only OS that throws a blue screen when things go wrong?

[central_va]

Unix OS’s don’t crash like that. The software the UNIX OS is currently running might crash, but usually the OS stays up.

[re_nortex]

Is Windows the only OS that throws a blue screen when things go wrong?

I can speak about Linux and Solaris. When things go utterly, horribly wrong in those operating systems, the error messages generally appear in white or gray text on a black background (in character mode).

The Linux error messages from the kernel are sometimes written in a lighthearted manner starting with the string, ``Oops'' followed by a stack trace showing the low-level details of what actually caused the kernel panic.

In every case I've encountered (rare those have been), it has always been due to a hardware component misbehaving such as a dodgy memory module or an unrecoverable I/O error on a hard drive.

[RachelFaith]

Yes. Windows is the only OS which has an OS level crash often known as the blue screen of death. All NIX OS’s, including OS X for Mac, has process stops which do not crash the entire OS with a blue screen. This is a result of the fact that Windows is a layered OS built upon the original 8086 legacy architecture.

While the modern Windows OSs are deep and wide in their scope, the primary reason they are sometimes called “Bloated” is to retain backwards compatibility, the memory addressing systems just append code for each level of the improved design, each time, each upgrade, layer upon layer, call after call, until the OS cannot even keep track of where what process began or where the return calls need to go... then the whole house of cards comes down.... BSOD!

All NIX code has a very tiny and robust OS kernel that orders all the other apps, processes and devices around. if any of them, misbehave, the kernel closes them and restarts them, assigning them to new memory slots.

Over simplified, but that’s the general difference.

[cynwoody]

While I am no MS fan, is Windows the only OS that throws a blue screen when things go wrong?

In the Unix world, it's called a kernel panic, after the name of the privileged function that is called to take the system down:

PANIC(9)		 BSD Kernel Developer's Manual		      PANIC(9)

NAME
     panic -- bring down system on fatal error


SYNOPSIS
     #include <sys/types.h>
     #include <sys/systm.h>

     void
     panic(const char *fmt, ...);

DESCRIPTION
     The panic() function terminates the running system.  The message fmt is a
     printf(3) style format string.  The message is printed to the console and
     the location panicstr is set to the address of the message text for
     retrieval from the OS core dump.

     If the kernel debugger is installed control is passed to it, otherwise an
     attempt to save a core dump of the OS to a configured dump device is
     made.

     If panic() is called twice (from the disk sync routines, for example) the
     system is rebooted without syncing the disks.


RETURN VALUES
     The panic() function does not return.

BSD				August 11, 1995 			   BSD

As far as color, black and white tends to be favored over blue and white.

Linux

Mac OS X