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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."
Even bill gates does not approve of Ctrl+Alt+Del
I find that at least I use both of the shift keys, unlike the right Ctrl, Alt, and Windows keys.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
if we start thinking in what was wrong building a computer with 25 years technology then we would lost count of the mistakes. If it weren't for the backing of IBM, it would been an instant market failure.
Once they got the "Windows Key", why did they continue using the Ctrl + Alt + Delete?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You're supposed to use the left shift key when typing a character on the right, and the right shift key when typing a character on the left. Speeds things up considerably.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I loved the power key on the old Apple ADB keyboards. I didn't enjoy the operating system back then, but I remember wishing PC's had such a key.
Because Ctrl-Alt-Delete is non-interruptible. This way one could be sure it was truly the login screen and not something impersonating the login screen. At least, that's how I remember it. Could be urban legend.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is, or was at least, a so called "non maskeable interrupt". This makes it harder for Trojan viruses to take over the login screen and steal your password.
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I had to look down and check. Wow, there is a set of those keys on the right.
Elegant? Ask an OSX user how to screenshot a window.
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??
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
In my book that is the one thing they got right. It is a cumbersome combination as it should be since you do not want to reboot your computer by accident.
It still irks me how easy is to accidentally shutdown your computer in windows when all you are trying to do is putting it to sleep through the menu.
In programming languages this is called "syntactic salt" and it is used to implement powerful primitives that should not be used lightly.
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
Because Ctrl-Alt-Delete is non-interruptible. This way one could be sure it was truly the login screen and not something impersonating the login screen. At least, that's how I remember it. Could be urban legend.
I coulda swore that the inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Delete said the same thing as you in an interview in the 1990s. Might have been in Wired? Could be in a link in the article that I didn't read too.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Why on earth would you want a key on your keyboard to be a non maskable interrupt? Heaven forbid you mistype, or someone comes walking by and hits it. I'm going to have to side with IBM on this one. Also, what does C.A.D. have to do with starting a computer? It was only added to the Windows startup processes as a way to trick malicious programs into terminating.
No it doesn't speed things up considerably. The shift key on the right can easily be used with the pinky while otherwise typing normally, only inhibiting the speed of the keys that you would type with your right pinky. And what else do you hit with your pinky? The 'Enter' key? Backslash?
I'm just glad we didn't have to do something like Ctrl + Alt + Del + F6 + Esc + (number pad) Enter for the same functionality.
Would your rather your PC just turned off without any error message whatsoever? The BSOD is a useful tool... the mistake that causes it lies elsewhere.
Semicolon; damnit; why don;t people use that one more often; I find it can replace all other punctuation;
Let us not forget the list or menu key or whatever it is called. Hell, not only do I not use it, I can't think of many times I have even heard people mention it. At least right now in firefox it seems to have the same effect as a right mouse click, but I only know that because I just tried it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
First one that comes to my find is "Why do I click 'Start' to stop?"
I guess every interface has such design fuck-ups.
I never used Mac OS but was told that you had (still have?) to drag the CD Rom or onto the trashbin to eject the drive.
That always sounded strange to me.
But people who type properly use both shift keys.
Many keyboards have a space between the Esc and F1 keys. I heard somewhere that to allow for adding undetermined capabilities later, they originally wanted to add another key in that space. As it would be for undetermined functionality, and to keep with the naming scheme of the other function keys, this key was to be labelled "FU". While the actual key was never adopted, it's spirit has lived on in every release of Windows.
I don't understand the problem. Ctrl+Alt+Del originally meant "reboot". That's obviously not something you want to do accidentally. If there's a problem it is in using the three-finger-salute for things other than reboot.
Proverbs 21:19
Hell, not only do I not use it, I can't think of many times I have even heard people mention it.
Woe betide you should you ever find yourself on a Windows machine without a mouse, then. Can't say I use it often but when I do I'm glad it exists.
=Smidge=
Which automatically saves it to the desktop as a jpg with a time stamp.
No stupid pasting into Paint & saving.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Caps Lock should've been a no-op placebo, like a lot of those pedestrian light-change request buttons at intersections.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete was actually a reasonable solution for the time, except maybe for certain handicapped users. Make sure the user never hits the reboot key by mistake.
The sleep key to put a computer to sleep was pretty common on OEM systems for a while (especially Compaq), but I see it less often now on basic keyboards.
If you run Windows and never use the Windows key, you're missing out on a lot of good keyboard shortcuts.
They could have stayed with the rolling stones - "Can't get no satisfaction", "As tears go by", "All over now", "19th Nervous Breakdown". Or if they wanted to be ahead of the times - "Get off my cloud"
I'm not sure how much it speeded things up, but IIRC mechanical typewriters had two shift keys and touch typists -- a significant percentage of potential PC users in the 1980s -- would probably have been quite unhappy without their two shift keys.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Hey now, I use the right ctrl and alt keys when I need to Ctrl+Alt+Delete with one hand... Oh wait!
AJ Henderson
Huh? NMI is a hardware thing, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is entirely a software thing. The only thing that ever had to do with NMI (related to this) is that on the PCjr the KEYBOARD used the NMI to signal a keystroke. This had an advantage that even if your PC somehow wound up in a interrupts-disabled state the keyboard interrupts would still be processed, and thus Ctrl+Alt+Delete would still work (the BIOS recognized the sequence and branched to the 'reset' code). On the other hand, it was a mistake because typing could interfere with timing critical things (like async comms). As far as I know, the PCjr was the only machine to ever use NMI for the keyboard.
Maybe what you are thinking is that there was no way (in Windows) to 'hook' the keyboard in a manner that could intercept Ctrl+Alt+Delete. That would prevent things from taking over the logon screen.
There is no Right Alt key. There is an Alt-Gr key, which isn't needed in the US, but in Europe, you need it to type characters that aren't on the main keyboard. For example, using my UK keyboard, Alt-Gr + 4 will type the € symbol, and Alt-Gr + e will type the letter é.
Perhaps, in the past.I seriously doubt that is still true. Modern USB keyboards have no special handling for C-A-D.
Neither did old keyboards, but that's not the point. The point is that the operating system's low-level keyboard drivers have special handling for it, at a level that can't be modified by trojans unless they can muck with the deepest parts of the system internals -- and if they can do that then they already completely own the machine anyway.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You don't have to. You can press the eject key on the keyboard, or choose Eject from the right-click menu :)
You can press the eject button on every Apple keyboard. Or right-click (control-click) the disc and choose eject. Or click to highlight the CD icon and press CMD + Y (put away) or CMD + E (eject) - Not much of a difference anymore, but in the old days when floppy swapping on a single drive was the thing, "eject" would leave the disc icon and directory contents cached on the desktop even after it spit out the floppy. If you clicked into it and tried to retrieve a file or whatever it would prompt you to insert the disk so it could complete the operation. At the time it was nice, since you didn't have to remember what was on what disc through trial and error, or writing really small on the floppy label, you could just have it psedu-mounted and still see the contents of multiple disks on your desktop on a single floppy system.
If you were finally done with it, you could drag the cached image to the trash can to "unmount" it. The "put away" command OTOH ejected the disk and removed the cached image immediately. Dragging the disc from the get-go to the trash had the same effect as "put away".
I used to work for a small company where we had 10 Linux servers and 1 windows NT box hooked to a Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) switch. My boss was using the windows server for Webtrends.
He would never check which server he was on before pressing ctrl-alt-del to login so he would reboot the Linux servers at random causing customers to phone us because they were offline.
Gladly enough, ctrl-alt-del isn't as hardcoded in Linux that it is in Windows. All I had to do is modify the init scripts to ignore ctrl-alt-del so that solved our problem.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
Microsoft calls this the "secure attention sequence." I have heard that older PCs' keyboard interfaces would directly generate an interrupt on reception of ctrl+alt+del, but I can't find anything to back that up.
Supposedly ctrl+alt+del was chosen to be the SAS in Windows NT because no existing app used it as a key combination.
I believe the intention was to make it harder for somebody to install a fake login screen on Windows. I remember reading about that somewhere. The idea was that even if you had a fake login screen running, pressing ctrl-alt-del would pop up the real windows login screen. It was supposed to me more secure that way ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
If I remember what I've read thirty years ago, Ctrl Alt Del was an IBM thing, not a Microsoft thing. An IBM engineer put it in as a debugging tool. If it had been deliberate it seems they would have used the SysReq key; in thirty years of using DOS and Windows I've never once seen that key used by any program, ever. SysReq would have been a better choice than alt-tab for switching programs when Windows came out, Ctrl-sysReq would have been superior to CtrlAltDel, and shift-SysReq would print the screen like it does now.
Is it irony or hypocricy that on my work machine, after you boot it you have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to log on, and again if the screen saver comes on? It's a really stupid, unergonomic and user-hostile design; move the mouse when the screen saver is on and rather than taking you to a login prompt like XP and 98 did, you get a screen instructing you to CtrlAltDel, only after you hit that does the login come on. It's a really stupid design, but that doesn't surprise me considering it's Microsoft.
Woe betide you should you ever find yourself on a Windows machine without a mouse, then.
Shift-F10.
There is no Right Alt key.
Err... I just looked down at my [US] keyboard and there is a key labeled "Alt" immediately to the right of the space bar.
The Compose key is a much better way to handle extra symbols. Sun keyboards used to have a key with that name, and on Linux you can assign one of those useless keys to the right of the space bar (I use "Window") to act as a Compose key. Compose = E to get €, Compose ' e to get é, Compose / l to get , Compose ~ n to get ñ, etc.
When you press Ctrl+Alt+Del on your computer, you know that the OS is the one that receives it so you know that the login screen before you was generated by the OS and not some malware that's sitting in userland.
When you 'simulate' it from a remote session, you lose that guarantee. Any malware could intercept the simulated Ctrl+Alt+Del and show you what looks like the OS login screen.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Bah, I find my right index finger works well on all keys. I've seen people feel all high and mighty because they use both index fingers, but I find 1 to be good enough for me. Whew, after typing all that, I need to take a break!
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I guess the screen limitation is to blame. Prior to 2007, expectation for touch screen were quite low. (single touch, resistive, only gesture supported is "tap").
My keyboard has two shift keys. He should have used one of those.
Where did you learn to type? Any typing class will teach you that you're supposed to use each shift key for the hand opposite to the hand which types the letter/number. Using one shift key all the time (usually the left) just puts that hand into needlessly slow and awkward claw positions.
Theoretically, you're supposed to do the same with the Ctrl & Alt keys, but keyboard manufacturers refuse to put those in a consistent, pinky-accessible spot on the right side. (Laptop makers, I'm talking about you.) That's probably one of the biggest reasons that one-handed shifting has become so endemic. If you want a redundant set of keys, I'd point the finger at those first.
(P.S. I also was taught to actually use the caps lock key when typing in caps, and it is a big pinky-saver when writing C macros.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That's a system setting, you can mess with it (assuming Admin rights) through control panel.
Control Panel > Users > Manage User Accounts > Advanced
At the bottom, "Secure sign-in" - take the tick out of that, and Apply.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
A lefty I know mouses with his left hand. Can't vouch for certain, but it's likely he uses the right set.
I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.
After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.
Seems like a bad design. Macs had a power key for ages on their keyboard, but it pulled up a shutdown prompt instead of killing the whole machine instantly. (You could hold it down for 3 seconds for a force power down, IIRC.) It was also far above the keys and hard to accidentally hit on the machines I remember. This is the one I had on my Performa 5200, and this was the one my old iMac had. (You can see the power key on the latter above the divide between the letter and numeric keypad sections.)
What was the keyboard you used like, and what OS was it for?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If I ever find myself on a Windows machine, I figure woe already done gone betided me.
WHAT ABOUT THE CAPS LOCK KEY?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You are an abnormal lefty, as my wife and I both mouse with the left hand and use the right hand ctl,alt,shift keys.
My sample of Two is 200% more than your sample of one so it makes it more better.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since most can't seem to be bothered to read the TFA, you're all a bit confused.
Gates isn't opposed to the three finger salute for rebooting, he's decrying M$ use of Ctrl-Alt-Delete to LOGIN TO WINDOWS.
It would be nice if the title represented the story accurately, but this is slashdot.
The reasoning I always understood to use the Ctrl-Alt-Del for login/unlocking was that it was difficult to hook so if you pressed it you were certain that what you were then typing your password into was an actual login screen rather than some application that looked like the login screen that was designed to steal your password.
Enter Sandman would have been better. Both more honest and far more bitchin'
Exit Light,
Enter Night,
Take my hand.....
We're off to never-never land...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
IBM Keyboards have tons of useless keys. If he had wanted a single key alternative for Ctrl-Alt-Del, SysReq, Break, or Pause would have been the obvious choices. In this instance, sanity seems to have prevailed, and the reboot key combination was something hard and obscure to type.
If you're going to rewrite history, try to pick a better lie. Ballmer gave it a good try with "we forgot about mobile and are late to the party" (reality: "we almost had mobile in the bag and then lost it through my incompetence").
Excuse me? Who's the one rewriting history here? At the time, SysReq, Break, and Pause had legitimate uses in the computing world (you know, when computers of that ilk were primarily used by programmers and system specialists). Sure, NOW they're not used often (besides SysReq, useful in kernel development), but back then, they had their function.
I dont think you understand how POS a POS system is. Most have utterly crappy touchscreens that do not support "gestures" only a single "tap event"
Almost 90% of all the Point of sale hardware out there are steaming piles of Fecies in quality, but cost 20X the price of regular hardware.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The summary doesn't give the real reason -- it's in TFA. As ctl-alt-del was a low level interrupt on the PC to restart -- getting out of a bluescreen or a hung desktop -- and given that it was absurdly easy to write a trojan that mimicked the login screen, it became necessary to force users to use ctl-alt-del to log in to be able to tell the difference between the real login process and a fake one. There really wasn't a better choice. People had already used the key combination for years to unjam windows, and it was an easy way to enforce a needed security measure.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Dave is the IBM engineer that "invented" alt-ctrl-del, was even a Jeopardy answer once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bradley_%28engineer%29
Bill Gates: If I had a nickel for every time someone had to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete - I'd be a Billionaire
Bill Gates: Oh Yeah, I am....
I dont think you understand how POS a POS system is.
Sure I do - I used to build Quicken-branded, XP-based abominations for a living; "Why the fuck do they ship an LCD display that isn't compatible with the other hardware??? Yer killin' me, Smalls!"
Most have utterly crappy touchscreens that do not support "gestures" only a single "tap event"
Almost 90% of all the Point of sale hardware out there are steaming piles of Fecies in quality, but cost 20X the price of regular hardware.
Agreed, but that doesn't change the fact that Windows-based touchscreen systems have had tap-and-hold-to-right-click since, like, 2003.
Since we're talking about Windows/MS stuff here, it would be kind of assanine to assume OP was talking about a non-Windows POS.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
CTRL+ALT+DEL was already a well known, highest priority, key combination from before windows existed. Back when hardware had actual interrupt assignments, the keyboard was assigned the lowest interrupt (the user in front of the keyboard was considered the most important and had highest priority over all other sub-systems - yes lower numbers had higher priorities for those who don't remember). CTRL+ALT+DEL was designed to allow the user to forcibly (and controllably) reboot the system should some lower-priority sub-system be mis-behaving. The only time this did not work was when the CPU itself was frozen (divide by zero, anyone?). That is where the low-level, special-handling was originally designed - in hardware.
Doesn't work in Google Chrome.
I beg to differ - I just tried it, works just fine (well, in Chromium, anyway - I don't see much reason to use the version that comes pre-loaded with Google spyware). As does the "menu" key.
Perhaps you have some misbehaving plugin capturing your keystrokes and not properly passing them on to the parent window?
This rule was invented when manual typewriters were common, so that it was extremely difficult to press and hold the left shift while striking a left hand key forcefully enough to transfer the ink. So most touch typists who were trained will stick to this rule. However I note that a lot of "self trained" typists who learned only on a computer have a more haphazard typing style even if they eventually learn to type quickly.
What's wrong with "You make a grown man cry"? "Start me up" FTW.