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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 would be staring at blue screen all day at work.
Thanks . . . I think . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Don't worry ... even if Bradley invented it, and Gates made it famous ... someone will be granted a patent for it a few years from now.
Creator of the Three-Finger-Salute, we salute thee!
(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!)
Fellowship 9/11
This is the only guy on the planet who can pick up girls in an internet cafe. Just walk in, smooth tone, slow walk.
"You know I invented CTRL ALT DEL?"
--
The last digit of pi is four.
And who is the inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace?
Wait, when we push it, it puts me in Windows...so I'm still associating bad things here.
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.
Yeah... I lost my job cause we were trained to use CTRL-ALT-DELETE to get into some S$S+3M hacking tools for NT but tried it on Linux for a web server computer and not only lost the company a lot of money, but my job as well... :(
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"
He should also be credited with solving thousands of Windows support calls...
"Well, I just don't know... Have you tried rebooting?"
crazy dynamite monkey
You know you rely on the ctrl alt del keys if you use windows. About time someone made a keyboard fit to your needs.
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.
Why not Alt-Ctrl-Delete or Delete-Alt-Control?
Not that we can change it now...
Miserable failure
The most I ever give to Windows is one finger.
"I never lived in this century." --Dan Quayle
And thus sums up the state of computing today.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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!!!
On your typical XP install the salute just brigs up the task manager. Nothing more, nothing less. Doesn't even halt (or even take precedence over, as far as I can tell) other processes.
I take issue with that, really. I need something a bit more forceful when the program I write does NOT do what it's supposed to.
Command-Control-Power. Now that's a three-finger salute! The force reboot is where the manliness of the Mac really shines through -- all three keys signify dominance. Linux and windows users have to use the hippy-dippy "alt" key, as in alt.sex and alt.drugs, combined with the "delete" or "backspace" key to signify a total lack of confidence in their own decisions. You wussies don't even have a command key!!!
... they just reboot.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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?
You would think it would be difficult to hit accientally, but my cat appears to be the exact length for just that on my keyboard... _and_ she likes to walk towards the numpad afterwards, hitting enter.
I think she has noticed how my head turns red and I leap around now. Stimuli->Response!
The OS where you press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in, and use the "Start Menu" to shut down.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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
One of the first thing a "REAL" linux administrator does is to disable that functionality in the hint, "inittab" . Change the binding to something like echo "Simulating stupid MCSE computer repair"
Got Code?
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.
He's just rebooting.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
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
If he hadn't come up with this, just maybe, Bill Gates would have had to write software that was somewhat reliable.
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.
Sometimes computers become so wedged that even pulling the power cable won't work. You have to open the case and pull the processor off the motherboard when that happens.
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?
Maybe if you learned to laugh at Windows' mistakes, you could be happy all the time?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
If he got a patent on it, and microsoft was charged $.01 per use, Microsoft would be out of business from all the crashes.
Fight Spammers!
The processor might burn though. I pour water on it first, just to be safe.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I immerse the entire computer in liquid nitrogen as fast as I can in order to keep the processor from overheating. Then I pick up all the little pieces and put them back through the holes in the case they came out of and shake gently.
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.
When Windows NT came out, touting that it supported MIPS and Alpha processors, the system boards for those chips did not have even a hint of this original hardware design. I thought that it was reasonable to drop support for that keyboard combination entirely on the software side, and special case trap it for any of the remaining hardware under x86. Drop it as a historic oddity and move on.
Instead, it was retained as a "security" feature in the NT line for logging in to a machine and locking the machine as if there were something special about pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL on all hardware -- if the keyboard even had those keys or they mapped to anything resembling the hardware on Windows NT came out, touting that it supported MIPS and Alpha processors, the system boards for those chips did not have even a hint of this original hardware design. I thought that it was reasonable to drop support for that entirely on the software side, and special case trap it for any of the remaining hardware under x86.an x86!
This alone was a big red flag to me that Microsoft didn't get it. Add to it the heavy x86 virtualization used on the other hardware and it was clear MS wasn't entirely serious about portability let alone real security.
With that, can anyone give a good reason to keep CTRL-ALT-DEL around for any function except as an old-time legacy habit for DOS/Windows users? Is there a technical reason why that combo is more valuable? I can't think of one...
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
"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.