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Bill Gates Acknowledges Ctrl+Alt+Del Was a Mistake
theodp writes "If he'd had his druthers, Bill Gates told a Harvard audience, Ctrl+Alt+Del would never have seen the light of day. However, an IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button to start things up, and thus the iconic three-finger-salute was born."
Ctrl-Alt-Del was a thing *before* Windows. Microsoft made use of it because it was there. It made sense to use it as a login trigger by intercepting its function. Especially since doing so put the reboot function under the control of the OS, not the user.
Yes, I've only read the summary, not the article itself, but I suggest you read this in conjunction with it, or afterwards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctrl_alt_del
its not urban legend. that is exactly, and Bill Gates himself says it so on the first paragraph that Bill talks in the summary's linked article:
From http://www.geekwire.com/2013/gates-harvard/
“You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software — actually hard-coded in the hardware — that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it’s able to do that,” Gates said.
PCs were held back by the AT standard power supply, which used a hard wired power switch. Only a handful of OEMs used "soft" power switches. IBM was one of the first using it in their PS/1 machines back in 1992 or so. Apple started using them even earlier. It wasn't until ATX style power supplies that soft power switches became universal on PCs around 1998 or so. The introduction of ACPI really pushed for it since it needed full control of system power.
The point of using control-alt-delete is that it's a key combination that can not be caught by any userspace process that does not have a special permission. This means that it's impossible to spoof the login screen on Windows without already having compromised the kernel. It doesn't matter what the key combination is, as long as it's one that is not delivered by the normal keypress event delivery mechanisms. Control-alt-delete is a reasonable choice, because no application author is likely to complain that they can't use this shortcut combination.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I use the Start key all of the time. Seriously. I use it in the following manner, essentially as a keyboard shortcut and linux holdover:
*Start* (type some keys) (enter) to launch a program.
Frequent uses include "cal" for Calculator, "not" for notepad, "wor" for Word, and "add or remove" for the Program Manager
*Start* (# key) to bring up window #.
One uses include Start+1 (Currently set to the Google App Launcher) (then used as the first example)
Another is Start+2, which is always my E-mail application (across multiple computers)
*Start*+R to bring up the "Run" dialog
Frequent uses from the Run dialog are "dxdiag", "cmd", and "regedit"
*Start*+D to "Show Desktop"
Admittedly used less now with the prevalence of two monitors
*Start*+E to bring up Explorer
Used ALL THE TIME
*Start*+CTRL+TAB to bring up a listing of all windows
Admittedly, this is mapped to a StrokeIt Gesture shortcut (but the point stands)
*Start*+DirectionalArrow (Up/Down/Left/Right)
Used to move, maximize, and restore a window. Try it, Start+Left will put a window at half of your left screen. SUPER USEFUL. USED ALL THE TIME. EXTRA POINTS ON A BIG MONITOR. This is the fastest way to move windows to a second monitor.
I probably do 90% of these every day. I use the Start key as much as CTRL and ALT.
Caps lock was invented for manual typewriters.
When you wanted to type a capital letter, the caps key would lift the platten ( the key bar had the uppercase character below the lower case character ).
The upshot of that was that when you typed an uppercase letter, there would be a slowdown while you waited for the platen to rise.
If you had to type several capital letters at once, it had several major effects.
First touch typists are never supposed to use Shift, CTL or Alt. and the key on the same hand. This slows you down. Actually there were no CTL or Alt keys back then. They were eventually added to only the left side of keyboards by geeks. When IBM started creating keyboards that directly entered strokes into the computer, they added both left and right. So a sequence like "CAPSLOCK" would have the person bouncing the platten up and down. This made the persons hands more tired and the typing much slower.
Caps lock was a solution to that.
Of course none of that logic applies to computer keyboards.