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

I don't understand.

[xevioso]

I thought it was supposed to be a *good* thing to prevent people from accidentally restarting their machines by pressing the wrong button. From that perspective, it's a success.

The fact that windows now adds a whole bunch of other options to that command, like change password, log off, lock the computer, etc, is entirely their fault; there's nothing stopping them from adding *those* commands to another button, say an F10 or something, that allows you those options. So what is wrong with Ctl-alt-del again?

Pretty dumb answer

[angel'o'sphere]

"Sure. If I could make one small edit I would make that a single key operation."
On an Apple ][ we had a reset key. However it only would work in conjunction with the CTRL key.
Why? So you can not hit it by accident and cause a reboot.
Basically every Workstation, Mini Computer, uses a 2 or 3 key combo which REQUIRES BOTH HANDS, so it can not be triggered by accident.

Is ctrl/alt/del a good combo? No idea, never cared.

It was a reacton to the Apple II reset key

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

The IBM PC was designed by observing the market leader (the Apple II with a Microsoft CP/M card) and copying all the good stuff while trying to avoid its problems. One of the problems of the Apple II was that reset was a simple key close to the return key. So it wasn't rare for you to type in stuff all night only to watch it all vanish due to a slightly misplaced finger. A popular add-on product for the Apple II was a little plastic cap for the reset key that you had to lift before you could press it. IBM selected three keys that were far enough apart than nobody would type by accident.

Re:It was a reacton to the Apple II reset key

[drinkypoo]

And it was a good enough idea that others copied it. The Amiga had ctrl-amiga-amiga and mac had cmd-option-escape, which is difficult to hit by accident but which can be done reasonably with one hand, as long as you have the left one.

Re:If I ever meet you

[apoc.famine]

As an example how this is useful, back when I was in college we had an old Vax network with green terminals. Being a cleaver asshole, I wrote a login screen emulator, which ran from my logged-in account. It captured the login and password, popped up an "incorrect password" notice, and then logged me out, terminating the login emulator. The victim would have a slighter longer than normal delay as they got dumped back to the login prompt, but the network was dodgy enough that it wasn't totally out of the ordinary.
 
Not many knew how to break a program that was running on the screen, so it wasn't likely that someone would be able to close the fake login program and be sitting there in my logged in account. If you had to execute something like CTRL+ALT+DEL to log in, that prank totally wouldn't have worked. Not saying I couldn't have found a way to do it, but it would have been much, much harder. With most terminals sitting at a login screen, it was pretty trivial to emulate that login with minimal risk of being noticed.
 
And for the record, I used this to make nefarious edits to people's finger data, subtly most of the time. Back in the stone age before social networks, we figured out who was on campus by fingering them. Had a whole ecosystem of profiles stored in there, from humorous to tragic. Most of the same drama as the current social networks, just plaintext and requiring terminal commands to access. I'd go in and do things like put subtle references to goats throughout someone's profile, or slip in things about "my son is also.." to make it seem like mom wrote it. Good times, good times.