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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.

3 of 867 comments (clear)

  1. Another interesting fact: by Sheetrock · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ctrl-Alt-Del is the only key combination on your computer that has its own hardware interrupt (similar to Ctrl-Open Apple/Closed Apple-Reset on Macs). Again, this was to prevent interception in real mode, however protected mode changes all rules.

    --

    Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
    -- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.




  2. Re:Er, that's a bit much.... by Mephie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Honestly, though, he is modest. The IBM Campus in Raleigh had a career builder seminar once that he attended. He actually showed a video where he was speaking at a small conference where Bill Gates was in attendence.

    On the video, someone made a comment about Ctrl-Alt-Del being a life saver as an easy way to reboot systems after a crash (back when the blue screen stayed up by default). His response was "I just coded the Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence. Bill Gates made it famous." The implication wasn't intentional, but the look on Bill's face was priceless.

    --
    Buy the President
  3. That's how alot of fiction by prisoner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    is written. It's a revelation to some but people like Tolkein, King, etc often don't really know, beyond the inital premise, what's going to happen in their stories. In Stephen King's "On Writing" he claims a creative process that is more discovery than anything else. There isn't an all-encompassing outline drafted ahead of time. He starts out with an idea like "what if there was a cemetary that brought people back to life" and proceeds from there. He likens it to simply catching the story on paper as it falls out of his head. I don't know if this is what Tolkein was talking about but it works for alot of people.