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Bill Gates Says He's Sorry About Control-Alt-Delete (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: At the Bloomberg Global Business Forum today, Carlyle Group co-founder and CEO David Rubenstein asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates to account for one of the most baffling questions of the digital era: Why does it take three fingers to lock or log in to a PC, and why did Gates ever think that was a good idea? Grimacing slightly, Gates deflected responsibility for the crtl-alt-delete key command, saying, "clearly, the people involved should have put another key on to make that work." Rubenstein pressed him: does he regret the decision? "You can't go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk," Gates said. But: "Sure. If I could make one small edit I would make that a single key operation." Gates has made the confession before. In 2013, he blamed IBM for the issue, saying, "The guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button."
I have a LONG list of things that I think Mr. Gates should be embarrassed about regarding Windows. The three finger salute is very, very low on my list.
Yup. Back in the days when Ctrl-Alt-Del did an immediate soft reboot of your computer, it was really smart to not have it be a single button. Not only was it not a single button, they chose keys that were all over the keyboard, making it very difficult to press them all accidentally. If you slipped and mashed your hand down on the keyboard, there's no chance you'd just happen to hit those keys.
Now, I don't know. What does it do? It opens the login screen if you're in a domain? It brings up a menu to bring up the task manager, I think? Those things could be a single button, but at the same time, I don't think we need to cram a new button onto keyboard designs just for that.
WIN+L will do that just fine.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The reason they used that combo in the first place was for compatibility with legacy applications.
Back in the olden days of DOS, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del immediately rebooted your computer. But, it's not really possible to accidentally press Ctrl-Alt-Del and lose whatever you were working on.
Bill has nothing to apologize for. There's nothing wrong with Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a combination used for historical reasons.
It is the most secure way of doing a login because it triggered an "interrupt" in the system, like a signal that could not be caught by the program running in the foreground. So programs couldn't fake the login screen.
But it was an interrupt--and one that took three keys--because it was used in the old days to reboot a system with a hung program. You wouldn't WANT a computer to reboot when you pressed one key, because then a random mistaken keypress could lose hours of work. (This was before autosave, remember.)
The common way of doing this today on linux is still what, Alt+Sysrq+b? Or for killing X, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace? They're still a 3-key combinations.
It's been thirty+ years and we should just change system or keyboard designs, but it wasn't a mistake.
Real lawyers write in C++
Yea this whole thing is silly.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete was a key combination trapped by the BIOS keyboard driver in the original IBM PC and it caused the machine to reboot. This meant it worked almost all the time (it did not work if the interrupt going into the BIOS was disabled or if something was done to the keyboard hardware so that it did not produce the right key codes). It was also pretty obvious that it should be hard to type accidentally, and this was pretty common on all computers at that time.
Since typing Ctrl+Alt+Delete caused a reboot, no MSDOS software used that key combination to do anything. Thus Windows (which was initially very concerned with being able to run existing MSDOS software) was able to safely use that key combination (and no other) for it's own purposes (Windows did change the keyboard interrupt so it did not go to the BIOS and thus stopped the reboot).
Later versions of Windows had to keep using that key combination as any other one may have interfered with existing software.
I would say they could have done something when they introduced the "Windows Key" since software was not using it yet. Hitting it could have done the job. Other than that, there is nothing really done wrong here, just back-compatibility causing grief.
I disagree, computers did, and still do, have a reset button. Control-alt-delete is a SOFTWARE reset. Not a hardware reset which is what the reset button is for. If you were doing some type of low level coding that froze the underlying operating system so control-alt-delete was not working, your last resort was resetting the hardware. Its only in todays modern operating systems that it has become a method to login.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
You never experienced the IBM PC/XT - where a power cycle could make your floppies flaky unless you ejected them first and the hard disks had to be parked before power cycle or you risked a trashed hard disk.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.