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Ctrl-Alt-Del Inventor To Retire From IBM

Posted by simoniker on from the resetting-into-his-dotage dept.

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.

3 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. It's also used by ObviousGuy · · Score: 1, Redundant

    To log in to Windows NT.

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
  2. Re:lets all grow up by dbrower · · Score: 0, Redundant
    you mean the system where you need to remember L1-A and then type "boot" to kick it? After ctl-alt-del had already been around for a few years?

    -dB

    --
    "It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
  3. Re:Three keys by foniksonik · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It's old school. If this was modded funny I'd ignore it but I'll answer in hopes that it'll never come up again.

    PrtScn == Print Screen and did just that back before there were scroll bars and windows and the mouse...

    ScrLk == Screen Lock and in the olden days it would lock the screen on your console as huge amounts of data would scroll by so you could take a closer look at something. I think you can still use it with some X Windows clients to do the same while looking at a terminal window.

    Pause Break is similar to Screen Lock but would pause the data dump and break the output to a new source... useful if your storage medium only holds 32 kb or is going to tape or a punch card and you need to pause it for a minute to put a new punch card in. also useful if you want to PrtScn!

    SysRQ damn I don't know. System Request? Maybe it presents a new command line prompt? or shows you a system dump of processes for debugging purposes?

    If I got anything wrong, please correct or improve upon.

    In any case these keys do absolutely nothing useful in Windows and I have no idea why they would persist....

    --
    A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.