Bill Gates Admits Control-Alt-Delete Is Silly

Microsoft’s founder has officially admitted that the puzzling Control-Alt-Delete key combination used to access the login screen was a mistake. In his speech at Harvard University, Bill Gates revealed that it was a mistake. This process was supposed to be performed with a single button.




Gates pointed out that this wasn’t entirely Microsoft’s fault. The matter was that the designer of the IBM keyboard refused to provide the software giant with a single button.

Control-Alt-Delete was from the very beginning designed as a combination used to reboot a computer, and in the early versions of the operating system it was a log-in screen. The IBM computer that Bill Gates helped develop was introduced three decades ago and he was at the mercy of suits at Big Blue.

This finally explains why the company used the somewhat difficult keyboard combination. In addition, this version of the story fleshes out what David Bradley, the engineer who invented the Control-Alt-Delete sequence said many years ago. Bradley claimed at the time that he came up with Control-Alt-Delete, but it was Gates who made it famous. The engineer had no idea why Bill used Control-Alt-Delete for the login screen, but now this hole in the story is finally cleared up.

At the moment, Windows XP and Windows 7 still use this combination, while Windows 8 uses it as a shortcut for locking the computer or accessing the task manager.