Bill Gates Acknowledges Ctrl+Alt+Del Was a Mistake

theodp writes "If he'd had his druthers, Bill Gates told a Harvard audience, Ctrl+Alt+Del would never have seen the light of day. However, an IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button to start things up, and thus the iconic three-finger-salute was born."

Re:So why continue it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because accidentally pressing the windows key in the middle of a game would shut down an entire computer instead of momentarily piss off a gamer.

Makes sense

[Dunbal]

That was back when programmers were also engineers, and they realized the risk of accidentally hitting a single key and wiping the contents of RAM without saving. A complex key combination avoids accidents. I really don't see a problem with it. And considering that (most) keyboards still haven't evolved a "reboot" key, there doesn't seem to be great demand. Hell even the "Windows Start" key is probably the least utilized key on my keyboard, only good to tab me out of FPS games by accident and get me killed when I meant to hit Ctrl or Alt.

Why would you want a single button???

[TWiTfan]

A single button that, if hit, would reboot the system???? That's is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. If you hit it by accident, goodbye to your work. Remember that when you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL in DOS, it didn't even give you a prompt to shut down, it just rebooted. Who in their right mind would want that in a single key??

What's wrong with it?

[wcrowe]

I don't understand the problem. Ctrl+Alt+Del originally meant "reboot". That's obviously not something you want to do accidentally. If there's a problem it is in using the three-finger-salute for things other than reboot.

No, Caps Lock was the big mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Caps Lock should've been a no-op placebo, like a lot of those pedestrian light-change request buttons at intersections.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete was actually a reasonable solution for the time, except maybe for certain handicapped users. Make sure the user never hits the reboot key by mistake.

Re:Redundant keys

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no Right Alt key in England.

FTFY

Re:Redundant keys

[Oligonicella]

A lefty I know mouses with his left hand. Can't vouch for certain, but it's likely he uses the right set.

Re:Makes sense

[swillden]

I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.

After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.

Apple keyboards have a power button on the keyboard. It's not the location or difficulty of hitting the key that matters, it's how it's handled. The approach currently used by Apple (but not invented by Apple, BTW) of "tap = request to shutdown, requires confirmation" and "press and hold means forcible power off" works just fine.

Re:rewriting history again?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM Keyboards have tons of useless keys. If he had wanted a single key alternative for Ctrl-Alt-Del, SysReq, Break, or Pause would have been the obvious choices. In this instance, sanity seems to have prevailed, and the reboot key combination was something hard and obscure to type.

If you're going to rewrite history, try to pick a better lie. Ballmer gave it a good try with "we forgot about mobile and are late to the party" (reality: "we almost had mobile in the bag and then lost it through my incompetence").

Excuse me? Who's the one rewriting history here? At the time, SysReq, Break, and Pause had legitimate uses in the computing world (you know, when computers of that ilk were primarily used by programmers and system specialists). Sure, NOW they're not used often (besides SysReq, useful in kernel development), but back then, they had their function.

Re:Redundant keys

[Lumpy]

I dont think you understand how POS a POS system is. Most have utterly crappy touchscreens that do not support "gestures" only a single "tap event"

Almost 90% of all the Point of sale hardware out there are steaming piles of Fecies in quality, but cost 20X the price of regular hardware.