If you’re a PC user, the keyboard combination “Control-Alt-Delete” might mean something to you if you’ve ever found yourself at the mercy of your extremely unresponsive machine. The ole Ctrl-Alt-Delete has probably saved you from an unnecessary reboot, which would require you to slightly shift your body to the side in order to push the power button on your PC tower, resulting in possible serious injury depending on how physically fit you are. But according to Bill Gates, the keyboard combination was a mistake.
Gates spoke with the Hardvard fundraising campaign where he admitted the Ctrl-Alt-Delete button presses wasn’t intentional. “It was a mistake… We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t wanna give us our single button.” That’s when engineer David Bradley came up with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete keyboard combination, which is still used to this day on PCs in order to either bring up a computer’s Task Manager or to completely lock a machine.
Considering how many keys there are located on a keyboard, we’re curious to find out why Bradley thought going with Ctrl-Alt-Delete was a good series of button presses, considering their placement on the keyboard. Either way, the sequence nearly didn’t happen if it weren’t for that hard-headed IBM keyboard designer.
Filed in . Read more about Bill Gates and Microsoft.