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Ah, yes. The Kobayashi Maru system prompt.

    - Press ESC to return to Windows, freeze, and restart.
     
    - Press ENTER to return to Windows, crash, and restart.
    
    - Press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to crash, freeze, or restart.
More like Oracle from the Matrix movies. It's there to provide the illusion of choice.
Ah, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. Even with SIQ, it was still better than this. Though I think the best solution to the SIQ problem is the "ghost" window solution similar to what went into WinXP.
What would Kirk do?
Hack the program and change it so Windows surrenders, duh.
Call Scotty.
Install gentoo
It's a pity Ballmer's writing skills weren't deployed for that Win32 regular:

This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.

I think I was 4 or 5 when I first encountered that message, and totally expected the feds to come kick down my front door.

EDIT: I believe I was playing "Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey" at the time.

I had a friend who was a BBS sysop while living with his parents. One day he came home to— "Son, we need to have a talk about the illegal activities on your computers."

Thus beginning a rather awkward conversation which was eventually resolved, to his relief, when he eventually realized they'd just seen a crash message on one of his screens.

I worked at MS in this era. My sister actually called me once and said something to the effect of "my computer says I've done something illegal. Am I in trouble?"
I still don't think it's especially well written.

"Press ESC to cancel and return to Windows"

Cancel what? From memory, hitting Escape would just throw you back into the stuck program and would help you not at all. I guess what is being "cancel"led is the blue screen, but that's hard to parse for me.

> Cancel what?

What you're currently doing, which is deciding if you'll kill the program or reboot the whole thing. This isn't rocket science.

> hitting Escape would just throw you back into the stuck program and would help you not at all

That depends on if you hit ctrl-alt-del because you thought the app was hung or if you thought Windows was hung. You might have hit it because you thought Windows puked but when you saw the Blue Screen you knew it hadn't and maybe the app hadn't locked up and you're going to go back and give it some more time.

Either way you had three options, one of them 'Do Nothing' and you might think otherwise but 'Do Nothing' is a valid option because of why you may have ended up here.

Or, it's always possible you hit it on accident.
Well ctrl-alt-del was picked as a combination because hitting it accidentally would be very difficult.
Which would be CTRL-ALT-DEL backfiring in a whole new way. I really don't envy the devs trying to cover all those cases...
Steve was foreshadowing the standard MB_OKCANCEL dialog box abuse which was to come:

    Cancel the Transaction which is In Progress

    [OK]               [Cancel]
On a similar note.

While watching twitch just now, firefox informed me that adobe macromedia is running an unresponsive script. Of course the video playback was fine, so I selected continue and kept watching. It did it again in a minute, of course the video was again fine. I clicked stop script out of curiosity and flash crashed.

Oh I've seen so many instances of this... I have music players "crashing" on me that kept playing music up until I confirmed the error message. I recall even having a game that was playable up until I confirmed the message that it apparently died.
Fast forward to 2014, and we have Exchange crashing the all system with a BSD on purpose as a final solution to recover from a I/O stuck situation: the Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl.exe) will detect those failure events and intentionally cause a bugcheck of Windows by terminating the wininit.exe process. [1]

In the article they say it's an improvement, I'm not 100% sure about it

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/scottschnoll/archive/2011/04/13/e...

Does anybody get the comment about Bill not actually sitting on the notebook? I've re-read the original several times, and it still understand it as Bill sitting on the notebook.
I think that "on top of" is meant metaphorically, as in usages like "the apartment was small so everyone lived right on top of each other". This can be contrived to make a sort of sense if the author (of that anecdote) had been planning to either sneak a peek at the notebook without Gates noticing, or suavely open the notebook "let me check my notes"---which is trickier if you have to say "let me check my notes, if you'll move your elbow, excuse my reach, thanks". Note that the notebook was "on the desk", so sitting actually on top of it would be strange.

But I agree that physically "on top of" the notebook was the first reading I had as well.

I was confused too, until I clicked all the links in the article and it was referring to this one: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/10/21/99102...
I am still confused, even knowing the authors intent it doesn't read at all like Bill sat in front of the book making access difficult/awkward, but rather that Bill literally sat on the book. Especially considering the joke at the start.
It's a footnote, indicated by the superscript "1". The story to which it refers to is linked at the end of the first sentence of the second paragraph. Commentators on HN typically use [1] to indicate their footnotes.
After reading the footnote, I still don't get it.
This article reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGQsBDSEpk

Needless to say, I don't think Bill Gates was very happy.

It doesn't appear to be immediately obvious, but what larger discussion is that clip from? It looks to be interesting.
I don't know about you, but if I had written that post, I'd include the before and after lock screen text.