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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.
And who is the inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace?
I remember Dave Cutler (the man in charge of WindowsNT, also the main VMS developer for DEC), when asked on why did MS use the CTRL-ALT-DEL keyboard combination to log on an NT machine, he said something like: "this combination is sure to be never used by any application". This was taking advantage of the tradition of using it to reboot the computer as everything in the DOS era was running in real mode, so nobody would use it for an application and the NT architecture enabled for the system to intercept it and use it in a supposedly better way. It was thought to be a neat idea.
Still, I think it was not really clever to teach the end-users such an important keyboard combination. I also remember some users back then thinking it would work the same in 95 as in NT, since both systems' GUI looked so similar.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Then, I believe, users clamoured for more convenience, so keyboard manufacturers started duplicating the ctrl and alt keys (and/or moved the del key) so that the salute could be performed one-handed.
Actually some keyboards have gone a bit too far along that road. I have seen a keyboard, where you could do CTRL+ALT+DEL with just a single keypress. Yup, they really added an extra key to do just that. Some people must have used CTRL+ALT+DEL too much.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Lisp machines were using a 5-key chord for reboot way before IBM PC. The chord LCtrl-LMeta-RCtrl-RMeta-Del was used on TI-Explorer. The meta key is the alt equivalence in lisp machines.
How can we convince the old men of IT history to commit themselves to Open Source projects? We should assume that they do not need to work any more and that they have all the time they want to spend on Free projects.
How would the world benefit from their insights and contacts?
What would motivate them?
Would a "mentor" scheme help to organise OS projects? Would it work?
it can't be handled by any input APIs (Win32/DirectInput)... it gets handled directly by the keyboard driver.
Close, but not exactly correct. It gets handled by "msgina".dll, which is loaded before logon, before anything else. msgina hooks the keyboard IO, and then traps any ctrl+alt+del presses before they reach other running programs. Modified versions of msgina.dll can be used to allow other programs to receive ctrl+alt+del presses.
This page gives a brief explanation of how things like Novell catch ctrl+alt+del, by replacing msgina.dll.
My server