Ctrl+Alt+Del Inventor Retires on 30/jan/2004
The engineer who invented the Ctrl+Alt+Del keystroke combination is
retiring today from IBM, leaving behind his legacy as an inexorable
part of the PC experience. David Bradley developed the key combination
while working on prototypes of IBM's first PC. He needed a way to
quickly reboot the buggy machine because a hard reset--which involved
flicking off the power switch and waiting a few moments before
retoggling it--took too much time. "The intention was to be cryptic,"
he said. "It was a key combination that was the moral equivalent of
turning the power off and back on again, so it was not an action to be
taken lightly. It wasn't something you wanted to happen accidentally."
Today, many people use the keystroke combination on a regular basis
and not always because the machine has become unresponsive. Microsoft
adopted the keystroke combination for use in Windows; today's Windows
versions use the combination to let people log on to the system and to
bring up a diagnostic screen. "I might have invented Ctrl+Alt+Del but,
as I like to say, Bill Gates made it famous," Bradley joked.