Gates Says Ctrl-Alt-Delete Was a Mistake
During an interview at Harvard University on September 21, 2013 – Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the Ctrl-Alt-Delete command was a mistake.
“Basically because when you turn your computer on, you’re going to see some screens and eventually type your password in, you want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signalling to a very low level of the software—actually hard-coded in the hardware—that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect,” Gates said. “Instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like your login screen and listens to your password and is able to do that.
“So we could have had a single button, but the guy that wanted to do the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button, and so we programmed at a low level… it was a mistake.”
— Question and answer with Bill Gates at the launch of the Harvard Campaign
Gates comments on “Control-Alt-Delete,” start at 16:30 of the video.
