Every PC user has given their computer the three-finger salute as it locked up – frequently at the most inopportune time. But why CTRL + ALT + DELETE? Turns out the three-finger salute was a 10-minute hack to make programmers life easier. The CTRL + ALT + DELETE was born at IBM (IBM) in the early 1980s.
Project Acorn was the code name for the rush project to build IBM’s new personal computer – because Apple (AAPL) and RadioShack were already selling small stand-alone computers. David Bradley was part of the team working from the IBM offices in Boca Raton, FL on the IBM PC.
Mental Floss reports that the programmers’ working on the IBM PC had to manually restart the entire system whenever the computer encountered a coding glitch. This was a waste of time. Mr. Bradley told Mental Floss, “Some days, you’d be rebooting every five minutes as you searched for the problem … The tedious tests made the coders want to pull their hair out.”
Mr. Bradley worked on everything from writing input/output programs to troubleshooting wire-wrap boards on Project Acorn. In order to placate the programmers, Mr. Bradley created a hack. His hack was a keyboard shortcut that triggered a system reset without memory tests.
To Mr. Bradley CTRL + ALT + DELETE, was just another item to tick off his to-do list. He says. “It was five minutes, 10 minutes of activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed to get done.”
The engineer chose the keys by location—with the DEL key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Mr. Bradley never intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect it to become a cultural icon. It was meant for his fellow coders, for whom every second counted.
Thank IBM for CTRL + ALT + DELETE
The IBM team managed to finish Acorn on schedule. In the fall of 1981, the IBM PC hit the market. It was a dull gray box beneath a green screen monitor. Marketers predicted that the company would sell less than 50,000 units a year. IBM execs thought that estimate was too optimistic. They were all wrong. Computing would never be the same.
As PC sales took off – few users were aware of Mr. Bradley’s shortcut hidden in their machines. That changed in the early 1990s when Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 3 took off. Now Microsoft’s Windows PCs were crashing and the infamous “blue screen of death” plagued Windows users. A quick fix to the BSOD spread by word of mouth (this was before the WWW) – CTRL + ALT + DELETE. Suddenly, Mr. Bradley’s quick hack was a big deal.
At an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC industry big-wigs gathered for a panel discussion. Mental Floss says that the first question to the panel bypassed Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and was for David Bradley. Mr. Bradley, who has always been surprised by how popular his CTRL + ALT + DELETE hack made him, was quick to deflect the glory. The programmer joked;
I have to share the credit, I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.
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Bill Gates has publicly admitted that CTRL + ALT + DELETE was a mistake – but the company he founded continues to use Mr. Bradley’s hack. In Windows 10 the keyboard combination starts Windows Security, which lets you lock the computer, switch to a different user, log off, start Task Manager, or shut down/reboot the computer.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
