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Bill Gates Says He's Sorry About Control-Alt-Delete (qz.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the awkward-maneuvers dept.

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."

31 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. If I ever meet you by maxrate · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll control-alt-delete you (Weird Al)

    1. Re:If I ever meet you by jandrese · · Score: 5, Funny

      Of course it also gave MS-DOS users pause the first time they were asked to log into a WinNT machine. "Is this a prank?"

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    2. Re:If I ever meet you by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:If I ever meet you by apoc.famine · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
    4. Re:If I ever meet you by Strider- · · Score: 4, Informative

      The whole point of Ctrl-Alt-Del was that it's protected in the BIOS. Invoking it would jump to a routine that was hard to override. In most cases, though, under DOS the subroutine just caused a reboot. Later operating systems, it was trapped for and was the one key combination that a user application couldn't map.

      --
      ...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
    5. Re:If I ever meet you by spitzak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re: If I ever meet you by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    7. Re: If I ever meet you by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
  2. That's the one?! by ngc5194 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:That's the one?! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:That's the one?! by default+luser · · Score: 4, Funny

      You know, like that stupid Reset button on the Apple II. Located conveniently above the RETURN key.

      Can't tell you how many times I fucking hit that thing.

      --

      Man is the animal that laughs.
      And occasionally whores for Karma.

    3. Re:That's the one?! by JohnFen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:That's the one?! by Z80a · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    5. Re:That's the one?! by dranga · · Score: 3, Informative

      On the apple 2e and later, yes, it required the control key.. on the 2 and 2+, just the reset button alone would reset the machine, and probably trash anything you were working on.

      --
      Oh no, not again.
    6. Re:That's the one?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Control keys are for mere "users". Just in case I ever have a little "emergency", my computer is configured to automatically wipe all memory and format its hard drive when pressing the "

    7. Re:That's the one?! by steveha · · Score: 5, Informative

      using the backslash for directory paths when every other OS used normal slashes

      You overlooked one other OS that matters here: CP/M.

      When MS-DOS was first developed, it was not the first DOS on the market; the majority of the business market was using Z-80 processor computers running CP/M. (Home users were on Apple II computers, mostly. Some business users used an Apple II with a CP/M card!) Anyway, MS-DOS looked and worked almost exactly like CP/M. MS-DOS programs were not that different from CP/M, I think deliberately to make it easier to port. The similarities were enough that the company that made CP/M threatened legal action over them. (Bob Zeidman checked the source code and he says no stolen code was present.)

      Anyway, the important thing is: CP/M used forward slash as the punctuation for command-line program arguments. Thus, so did MS-DOS.

      And nobody was really thinking too much about directory separators because CP/M, and MS-DOS 1.x, did not have directories. They used floppy disks, and those disks just had one directory. Just a flat list of files.

      When MS-DOS 2.0 came out, someone was thinking of the slash for directories, because there was an actual command that you could put into your config.sys file that let you switch the character used for command-line switches. This was SWITCHAR and if you set it to - you also set the directory separator to forward slash. It was undocumented! It was never officially supported! And I think MS-DOS 3.0 dropped it and it never returned. (But in Windows, even today, you can just use forward slash as a directory delimiter and it works.)

      I think that Microsoft had the opportunity to push on this. Just say "old MS-DOS apps that are using the old APIs can continue to use forward slash for command-line switches, but any program that works with directories should use the dash. It's The New Standard." I think they could have pulled it off, with some grumbling but nothing serious. But either someone at Microsoft was timid, or else they had an argument about this with IBM and lost, I don't know.

      But way back in the dawn of time, compatibility with CP/M was the reason why forward slash was reserved as the command-line switch marker.

      P.S. I think the registry was a good idea. Having a little database to store options, and have some kind of daemon that owns it, avoids race conditions and is just good sense. However, using an opaque and fragile binary database format was insanity. They could have used a simple text-based format (like .ini files... or, heck, S-expressions!) and saved the world a lot of pain. Or, at least made their binary database less fragile and documented it completely so that third parties could write registry checker tools that could fix corrupted registries or whatever.

      Ideally they should have used JSON for the registry, but I'm pretty sure the registry pre-dates Javascript, let alone JSON as an interchange format.

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
    8. Re:That's the one?! by Waccoon · · Score: 3, Informative

      I like how everyone forgets that MacOS originally used the colon for directory separators, among other weirdness.

      Conforming to UNIX standards was not that common in the budding PC industry. MS always gets the blame because they're one of the few companies that actually survived.

  3. I don't understand. by xevioso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:I don't understand. by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:I don't understand. by FrankHaynes · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's a terrible thing to say about the President!!

      --
      slashdot: A failed experiment.
  4. Compatibility by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 4, Informative

    The reason they used that combo in the first place was for compatibility with legacy applications. In legacy Windows, CTRL+ALT+DEL was handled at a low level and could bring up task manager or restart the machine. Applications could not detect the keypress.

    When they went to implement multi-user and logins, they realized they needed to ensure applications could not spoof the login screen to trick users into entering their credentials. A malicious application could potentially save and reuse these credentials especially if they were of a DIFFERENT user or an admin user.

    What to do? Well if they had the user press a key combination that applications couldn't detect to log in, or even a key combination that would result in a different action if they were already logged in, a fake application would not be able to detect this keypress and spoof the actual login screen. Guess what, an existing key combination fit this criteria. They could have invented a new combination, of course, but chances are a legacy application might use this combination as a hotkey, and reserving it for login user would break that application.

  5. Re:Compatibility Addendum by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 3, Informative

    I forgot to mention... I think the key combo stretches all the way back to MS-DOS, where CTRL+ALT+DEL would instantly reboot. I assume 16-bit Windows trapped this combination first of all so DOS wouldn't intercept it and reboot right away, and also so they could anticipate the user was having problems and offer to run Task Manager. But the key combo was first declared in DOS as a key press that could be used to soft reset the machine, but would not be pressed accidentally. CTRL+ALT+DEL makes perfect sense for that scenario. Then it just evolved organically.

  6. Pretty dumb answer by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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.

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  7. It was a reacton to the Apple II reset key by Jecel+Assumpcao+Jr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:It was a reacton to the Apple II reset key by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  8. Re:the reason by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's called a NMI, or non-maskable interrupt... except... it actually isn't one of those, at least not at the hardware level. There's no line dedicated to it on the keyboard bus. It might have been way back in the way back when the keyboard controller was a big fat DIP IC.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  9. Not to lock it by Trogre · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  10. Re:People with disabilities by bioteq · · Score: 3, Informative

    We had an instance where one of our customers only had one hand.
    Pretty difficult to do the three finger salute with one hand.
    They were resorting to putting things in their mouth to get the third key.
    I bought a cheap USB keyboard, took out the PCB, figured out what to short out to get CTRL-ALT-DEL,
    and put it in a box with a single button.
    Problem solved.

    I have fairly small hands and I am able to CTRL+ALT+DEL with one hand -- My right one.

    Maybe some keyboards make it difficult, but every one I use has made this possible.

  11. Re:Compatibility Addendum by Nonesuch · · Score: 3, Informative

    The apology was for the choice to capture the historical "Reboot" key sequence and re-purpose it for logon. This was particularly annoying when we still had a mix of OSes in the workplace, and people got into the habit of walking up to any unknown "PC" and the first thing they do is give the 3-finger salute, rebooting the computer if it was running something other than the latest Microsoft product.

    Almost as big a sin against computing as the 1994 introduction of the "Windows Key".

    --

    I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
  12. hes a master of time now? by n3r0.m4dski11z · · Score: 3

    "You can't go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk," Gates said.

    That sounds suspiciously like something a retired time traveller would say...

    --
    -
  13. You're Both Right--History by SeattleLawGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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++