Control-Alt-Delete? Bill Gates Says Command Was a Mistake - East Idaho News
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Control-Alt-Delete? Bill Gates Says Command Was a Mistake

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Getty 032513 BillGates?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1380213156550Sean Gallup/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — It’s a shortcut all Windows users know. A frozen program? Slow performance? The first move is, of course, holding down those three keys — Control-Alt-Delete. It’s a three-finger move to get to the task manager or get to a log-in screen, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates now admits the command was a mistake.

When asked who came up with the shortcut during an interview at Harvard University this week, Gates said “it was a mistake.”

“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,” Gates said. “We programmed at a low level. …It was a mistake.”

That IBM PC engineer was David Bradley. Bradley, who designed the computer in 1980, said in an older interview that “it was originally intended to be what we would now call an Easter Egg, just something we were just using in development — it wouldn’t be available elsewhere.”

That certainly wasn’t the case. Introduced in 1981, the command still lives on in Windows, including Microsoft’s current Windows 8 operating system.

According to a 2010 article in the Indianapolis Star, the original idea was to create a way to restart the computer. He chose those keys because he didn’t want people to mistakenly hit the keys and on that original IBM keyboard the Delete key was on the other side and, thus, required two hands.

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