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."

Comments

That's the one?!

[ngc5194]

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.

Re:That's the one?!

[ShanghaiBill]

This was my reaction exactly.

Actually, I think CTRL-ALT-DEL is one of the things they got right. There is little chance of doing it by accident, a dedicated button would have been a waste of keyboard real estate, and resulted in far more inadvertent resets.

It actually makes sense that the decision was forced on Microsoft, and if the decision had been left up to Bill, he would have taken the dumb alternative.

Re:That's the one?!

[JohnFen]

Yes, I agree that Control-Alt-Delete is an entirely reasonable design, and I'm not sure why Gates is apologizing for it -- particularly when there are a number of other things that I think most people would agree he should apologize for.

For instance -- using the backslash for directory paths when every other OS used normal slashes. As a developer, I think I curse that about once per week.

Or, maybe more controversially, the registry.

Re:That's the one?!

[Z80a]

I think hide known extensions should be quite higher on the list.

Re:I don't understand.

[nine-times]

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.

Re:If I ever meet you

[rudy_wayne]

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.

You're Both Right--History

[SeattleLawGuy]

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.

Re: If I ever meet you

[Z00L00K]

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.