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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.
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.
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