Bill Gates: Ctrl-Alt-Delete ‘Was A Mistake’

Bill Gates: Ctrl-Alt-Delete ‘Was A Mistake’

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

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. [Harvard via GeekWire via The Verge]

Picture: Johan Larsson/Flickr


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