Black Screen of Death
[prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far Side
cartoon.] A failure mode of {Microsloth Windows}. On an attempt to
launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the
screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold {boot} to
recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of
Death. See also {Blue Screen of Death}, which has become rather more
common.