Bill Gates: Ctrl-Alt-Delete "Was a Mistake"

[onehandle]

The keyboard combo that is Control-Alt-Delete may have become iconic—but according to Bill Gates it was all just a big mistake.

Talking to the Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates admitted that the series of button presses was far from intentional:

It was a mistake... We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't wanna give us our single button.

Indeed, responsibility for Ctrl-Alt-Delete rests with David Bradley, an engineer who worked on the original IBM PC. It's an enduring legacy, too; the button combo still works in Windows 8 to lock a PC or run Task Manager. Quite a long history for a mistake.

http://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-ctrl-alt-delete-was-a-mistake-1399473610

[liberal N proud]

1. Think about how people would complain about losing their work if one button killed everything?

Oh, wait, the power button does that when Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn't work.

[CrispyQ]

4. That's why Ctrl-S is the most important keystroke shortcut!

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Bradley once said, "I invented <ctrl> <alt> <del>, but

Bill Gates made it popular.

[Warpy]

3. I can see the single button being problematic

for people who aren't the best typists, myself included. I hit the wrong button often enough for it to have been really annoying if they'd gone that way.

Besides, the three key salute was the first command I learned. I was indecently proud of myself at the time.

[Go Vols]

5. ctrl-shift-esc

will get you to the task manager on win7

[IronLionZion]

6. Then change it Bill!!!

Pick keys that are closer together for one-handed access. And 2 keys should be plenty. How about control shift?

[lpbk2713]

9. Yeah. WTF good is being the richest man in the world ...

if you can't get thiings done your way when you want it.

[philosslayer]

10. It's too late at this point

Look at it another way. The QWERTY keyboard is actually designed to slow typing down because old hammer typewriters couldn't handle fast typing. Yet I see no great push to change something as fundamental as a keyboard.

People have enough problems with computers as it is. Changing CTRL-ALT-DEL would just be another thing we'd have to learn.

[IronLionZion]

12. We learn new stuff all the time

like smartphones and new security measures. Ctrl-alt-del is definitely changeable.

I'll agree that QWERTY is beyond help. There are touch screen keyboards for various devices where you can switch if you want to experiment.

[LanternWaste]

11. And a Beatles reunion while he's at it.

And a Beatles reunion while he's at it.

[hunter]

7. Microsoft and the x86 PC architecture were a mistake.

Those are years of my life I'll never get back...

Sometimes I think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were sent here by aliens to impede human progress.

[Recursion]

8. Better than the old Macs, where you hit the "Off" button to turn them on.

The idea of a keychord hardware interrupt is a good one. The problem is after Windows 2000 it stopped being a hardware interrupt and went in with the rest of the keyboard vector.