Slashdot Mirror
Ctrl-Alt-Del Inventor To Retire From IBM
wherley writes "AP reports that IBM'er David Bradley, who came up with the (in)famous Ctrl-Alt-Delete key combination, is retiring. The article mentions: 'At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys. 'I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,' Bradley said. Gates didn't laugh. The key combination also is used when software, such as Microsoft's Windows operating system, fails'." We featured a story on Bradley a few months back.
I RTFA and here is why he chose that...He chose those keys specifically as it's not a key sequence that can be struck by accident. This straight from the previous slashdot article.
For one thing, it's damned near impossible to hit those three keys simultaneously on accident. Other than that, there's nothing special about the combination.
On the Mac, the sequence is Command-Option-Escape.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
I don't remember where I got it from, but I have an ASF of the movie. Decided to throw it up on my CMU webspace so lets see if we can /. andrew =)
CtrlAltDel.asf
Oh, the movie doesn't start 15 seconds for some reason. Wasn't me.
'I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,' Bradley said.
Note that Bradley claimed to be referring to the NT logon procedure. Full quote is from this video.
(Anyone else get bit by the Linux will reboot with CRTL-ALT-DEL, but Win NT 4-XP will ask for Logon? I've rebooted machines on KVM switches by accident many a time, especially if I can't remap the salute like I usually do!)
/etc/inittab
You mentioned remapping the salute, but it was vague on which OS you meant, so I thought I'd just clarify.
You can change the program that is run when you press CTL-ALT-DEL on Linux by editing
It's possible for this to have been disabled in the BIOS, however the only PCs I've ever seen with no support for this at all are some old low spec Compaqs.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
PtrScrn - Used to be used to send the current screen of characters to your printer. Now copies the equivilent of the windows framebuffer to the clipboard.
SysRq - Not sure on this one, never used it, - possibly from mainframe terminal keyboards.
Pause - Paused the exeuction of the running program (remember: this was before OS's capable of multitasking), still used occasionally in games.
Break - killed the current program, well at least it was supposed to. You had to add a CTRL to it when pressing. I believe it originally came from when mainframe terminals were popular.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
it can't be handled by any input APIs (Win32/DirectInput)... it gets handled directly by the keyboard driver.
This kind of keystroke is called SAK (Secure Attention Key), as it's not specific to Windows NT.
SAK is an keystroke (or other event, for example sending "break" on a Sun serial port) that the OS guarantees only the Operating System can ever handle.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Hmmm, google is your friend. This page covers all three keys, but here is a little description of each:
The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen output typically was limited to 80 characters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of programs, spreadsheets being the obvious example, it's still handy now.
In layman's terms [...], "You can make a multitasking program manager monitor a specific location in your computer's hardware so it can do something cool, such as letting the user switch tasks, when the SysReq key is pressed." As it turned out, the developers of Windows didn't use SysReq when implementing task switching. Some new keyboards no longer feature this key, and its days seem numbered.
The Pause/Break key was used in the DOS command line environment to pause scrolling of text on the screen, which could, depending on the program and its method of text output to the screen, have the effect of pausing program execution.
Cameron King
Look at an original 84 key keyboard (which is what the original PC shipped with), Control and Alt weren't duplicated on the right side of the keyboard (for that matter, control was where we expect capslock now). It would have been really hard to hit it with a single hand.
Ctrl+Shift+Esc will bring up the task manager directly without having to go through the security box.
to pause a booting system so I can read/write down useful info like bios versions. Just hit enter when your done and away you go.
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The Magic SysRq key makes a Request to the Linux System -- Alt + SysRq + (on x86)
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt
For more details, study
Very useful. Far more convenient than pressing some chord that brings up a GUI screen with buttons to press. The framebuffer may be corrupted, for instance, or the mouse non-responsive, or the GUI server frozen, etc.
"Bill did not laugh." Oh, come on. You make it sound like he was pissed. If you've seen the video, he smiles light-heartedly at him and takes the joke.
He's not some evil guy--he's human like everyone and can take criticism in good fun from colleagues.
Bill getting slammed about the three-fingered salute
Bill at the Windows 98 premiere watching the demo blue screen
I'd almost feel sorry for the guy, but he's worth more than most countries and can do whatever the hell he wants.