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The Guy Responsible For Ctrl-Alt-Del

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the three-finger-salute dept.

Gannett News is running a story about David Bradley, the IBM engineer who, in 1980, coined Ctrl-Alt-Del. Interestingly, he meant for it to remain a developer-only tool, not something for end users, and certainly not to have Windows users change their passwords or logoff. He also says he chose those keys specifically as it's not a key sequence that can be struck by accident.

8 of 867 comments (clear)

  1. Er, that's a bit much.... by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ....from the article:

    > He's much too modest. Would Alexander Fleming
    > have said, "It wasn't a memorable event," when
    > he discovered penicillin?

    Crikey.

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    The Army reading list
    1. Re:Er, that's a bit much.... by jason0000042 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The author's comparing reseting a dead Windows computer with penicillin. Isn't penicillin used on unwanted infestations of bacteria? Not that far off, if you ask me.

      But CTRL-ALT-DELETE wasn't discovered, as the article states. It was developed. Bradley made it up. Comparing it to the discovery of penicillin is like saying Tolkien discovered the lord of the rings.

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      i don't like my old sig.
  2. Wow, this is really bad article.... by malakai · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It was not a memorable event," said Bradley, a longtime IBM employee, speaking of that day in 1980 or '81 when he discovered control-alt-delete.
    ...

    He's much too modest. Would Alexander Fleming have said, "It wasn't a memorable event," when he discovered penicillin? Would Albert Einstein have said, "I really can't recall when I discovered E=MC squared?"

    uh huh...

    Bradley chose the control and alt keys because he needed two shift keys to make the operation work, and he chose the delete key because it was on the opposite side of the keyboard. He didn't want people to hit control-alt-delete by accident.

    It's more complicated than that, of course, but most people don't have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University, as Bradley does


    oh please. He picked a key sequence that's difficult to accidentally set off. So what? It could have been shift-esc-break. If this is what a Ph.D. in electrical engineering is good for, I'm glad I don't have mine.

    And the reason MS used it for login in NT 3.1 was for security. It negated the possibility of a impersonation client that displayed an image which looked like the NT 3.1 login, but just stole Passwords instead. If such a client was written to DOS or Windows it would simple reboot. So it was a sanity check, at the time.
    --
    -Malakai
    A Dragon Lives in my Garage
  3. exactly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bradley says the "strength of the country" is at stake because relatively few students go into science or technology

    Why should they when engineers can't find jobs, salesmen are making 6 figures and MBAs are stealing all the money.

  4. Re:Heh. by 1010011010 · · Score: 4, Insightful


    It still needs reboots. It acts better once rebooted. In generalm Win2k and XP get alower the longer they run, and start experiencing problems like randomized icon images, windows that don't redraw, loss of fonts, etc. A reboot fixes all. When my Win2k laptop gets to where it's using >350MB of RAM, and I've closed all the apps, it's asking to be rebooted.

    --
    Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
  5. Not enough technology students by antirename · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, this guy thinks that too few students are going for science or technology degrees? I wonder why... lets see, scientists dont make much. Manufacturing is moving to the third world, and taking a hell of a lot of engineering jobs with it. IT is moving to India. Yeah, I'd be sure to pick one of those fields if I were trying to decide on a major. You can't blame the students for the decline in "the strength of the country", they're just looking out for themselves and trying to pick a career that might actually have a future.

  6. Re:The only difference is... by micromoog · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Windows automatically reboots itself now. Explorer crashes, then restarts itself.

    If you're going to get to that level of detail, shall we discuss the (in)stability of Gnome/KDE? It seems all to convenient that when Slashdotters define "Windows crashing", it includes any operational glitch at all, but "Linux crashing" seems to be confined to kernel panic only.

  7. Why Ctl-Alt-Del (by Dave Bradley) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On the original PC keyboard there were only 83 keys. There was a single CTL key, a single ALT key (above and below the left hand shift key respectively) and a single DEL key (on the far right of the keyboard, just to the left of the big + key). I'd post a picture if I knew how. So it was definitely two handed.
    There were 8192 bytes available for the IBM PC ROM BIOS. We used about 8180 of them. Two of the keys needed to be shift keys (for code conservation) and I picked the "newest" shift keys. The third key was picked to be as far away as possible, and "DEL" was a better mnemonic than "+".