"Although their fans speak of them in almost transcendental terms, the major
desktop OSes sometimes exhibit all the rigor of a tube of toothpaste: You
squeeze here, it bulges there; you squeeze there, it breaks. It's almost
axiomatic in computer technology, of course, that every strength is
simultaneously a weakness, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the
crash performance of the major desktop OSes.
Under stress, Windows 3.1, Windows NT 3.5, OS/2 Warp, and Mac OS 7.5 (the
PowerPC and Motorola 68000 versions) are all vulnerable to their own
particular brands of system failure. They are often called General
Protection Faults (GPFs) in the Windows world and System Bombs on the Mac
side. These flashes of woe (or whoa) typically render the active software
application unusable and can freeze the whole system solid, requiring
rebooting. As a bonus, you probably lose whatever you were working on, too."
Bruce Brown an article in BYTE
Crashing the party