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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.
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.
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.
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
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;
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.
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=
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.
Not the XT, but some food for thought:
Back when IBM was planning their original personal computer (note that "PC" used to mean any personal computer, but the IBM-PC's success hijacked the name), one design they considered was based on the 801, an early RISC processor about 45 times more powerful than the 8088 they ended up using, and their own modern operating system instead of Microsoft's junk... yeah, that's no typo, FOURTY FIVE TIMES more powerful: the 8088 @ 5 MHz did a paltry 0.33 MIPS, while the 801 did 15 MIPS.
Think about it, the PC started with the wrong foot. A broken, twisted, crippled, atrophied foot. How much technological progress did we lose because we had to waste time overcoming the limitations of this super shitty beginning?
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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.
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.
How much technological progress did we lose because we had to waste time overcoming the limitations of this super shitty beginning?
Hard to say. Because: Its also true the XT they shipped was built of mostly COTS parts. There is no reason to think a much bigger project the 801 based machine with some operating system that would have to either be written or ported from 390 or elsewhere would have ever made it out the door before getting canceled.
I don't even know your more powerful machine would have been successful; honestly IBMs experience with Operating Systems and interfaces at the time would not have translated well to home users and SMBs. MS-DOS was something motivated people could figure out on their own with manual.
IBM would have had to build something that did not use JCL would would have been radical for them at the time. Because there aint no way people would have picked that up.
So its very likely we would have never had a more or less 'open' PC platform at all, it would have all been the very proprietary 8-bit and early 16-bit stuff in the space from Ti, C=, and others.
We might still be well behind where we are today.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
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
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").
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.
CAPS LOCK IS WONDERFUL, I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT
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.
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.
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.
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.
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