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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
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)
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.