Bill Gates Says Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake

Bill Gates Says Ctrl+Alt+Delete is IBM's Fault

Ctrl + Alt + Del. You've probably done it hundreds of times over the years you've been using computers. But did you know that Bill Gates never wanted that sequence to exist in the first place? Apparently, Gates wanted the function of Ctrl + Alt + Delete to be taken care of with a single button. Unfortunately, IBM's keyboard design didn't allow for it.

"It was a mistake," the Verge quotes Gates as saying during an interview at a Harvard fundraising campaign. "We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't wanna give us our single button."

Despite Gates' admission that he sees the combination as a mistake, it still exists on Windows machines today. The engineer that came up with it is David Bradley, who worked as a designer on early IBM computers. According to CNN, Bradley says they didn't mean for it to be available outside of development.

"I originally intended for it to be what we would now call an Easter egg -- just something we were using in development and it wouldn't be available elsewhere," Bradley said in 2011. "But then (software publishers) found out about it. They were trying to figure out how to tell somebody to start up one of their programs, and they had the answer. Just put the diskette in, hit Control-Alt-Delete, and by magic your program starts."

Bill Gates left Microsoft Gates stepped down from his position as CEO of Microsoft in January of 2000 and instead filled the role of 'Chief Software Architect.' In 2008, he stopped working full-time at Microsoft to focus more on his philanthropy.

September 26, 2013