Originally designed to trigger a reboot of a PC, Ctrl+Alt+Del now allows users to log on to Windows and access the task manager. It is also known as a quick fix for the infamous "blue screen of death" on PCs, and the phrase has been adopted in popular culture to mean "to do away with" something.
Speaking at a fundraising campaign at Harvard University, however, Bill Gates blamed IBM engineer David Bradley for the so-called "three-fingered
salute", claiming that he had favoured a single button.
"We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard
design didn't want to give us our single button," he said.
Bradley originally designed Ctrl+Alt+Esc to trigger a reboot, but he found it
was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer
accidentally. He switched the key combination to Ctrl+Alt+Del – a
combination that was impossible to press with just one hand on the original
IBM PC keyboard.
During IBM's 20th anniversary celebrations, Bradley said that while he may
have invented the shortcut, Bill Gates made it famous. However, his
involvement has made him something of a programming hero, with fans asking
him to autograph keyboards at conferences.
In his speech, Gates went on to praise IBM's keyboard designs, claiming that
the two companies "did some very clever things" in the early days
of computing.
"The IBM PC character set, usually you have 128 characters like the lower case and upper case but we took the upper ones and put like suit symbols in – we were able to experiment with a lot of stuff but more on the software side and not the hardware," he said.
"The IBM PC character set, usually you have 128 characters like the lower case and upper case but we took the upper ones and put like suit symbols in – we were able to experiment with a lot of stuff but more on the software side and not the hardware," he said.
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