The
unique combination of three keys on the traditional QWERTY keyboard -- control,
alt and delete -- is one of the most memorized gestures in the history of
computing. But Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates said
the all-important function was not supposed to exist.
“It was a mistake,” Gates said at a recent Harvard fundraising campaign, which evoked
several laughs from the audience. “We could have had a single button, but the
guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t wanna give us our single button.”
You can thank David Bradley for “control-alt-delete.” One of
the key designers on the first IBM PC, Bradley initially created the mechanism
to trigger a “soft reboot” of the computer, choosing those particular keys
since it would be impossible to press all three with one hand (on the original
IBM PC keyboard). Since then, the “control-alt-delete” combination has been
designed for different purposes relating to interrupting or facilitating
certain functions on the computer. In DOS and the early years of Windows,
“control-alt-delete” would trigger a reboot of the computer. After Windows 3.1,
the command would invoke a task manager that would allow users to end Windows
sessions, and in most Windows versions since then (including Windows XP and
Windows 7), it will let a user log in or log out of their account.’
Source: IBTimes
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