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Bill Gates Acknowledges Ctrl+Alt+Del Was a Mistake

Posted by timothy on from the tilde-backspace-left-arrow-was-taken dept.

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."

3 of 665 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So why continue it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because accidentally pressing the windows key in the middle of a game would shut down an entire computer instead of momentarily piss off a gamer.

  2. Makes sense by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That was back when programmers were also engineers, and they realized the risk of accidentally hitting a single key and wiping the contents of RAM without saving. A complex key combination avoids accidents. I really don't see a problem with it. And considering that (most) keyboards still haven't evolved a "reboot" key, there doesn't seem to be great demand. Hell even the "Windows Start" key is probably the least utilized key on my keyboard, only good to tab me out of FPS games by accident and get me killed when I meant to hit Ctrl or Alt.

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  3. Why would you want a single button??? by TWiTfan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A single button that, if hit, would reboot the system???? That's is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. If you hit it by accident, goodbye to your work. Remember that when you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL in DOS, it didn't even give you a prompt to shut down, it just rebooted. Who in their right mind would want that in a single key??

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