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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."

18 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 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...
    4. 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 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 "

    6. 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
  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. 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.

  6. 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++