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

[JMcEntegart]

Gates doesn't want the blame for Ctrl + Alt + Delete.

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

 

[funguseater]

There were a number of functions attached to ctrl + alt. How would adding an extra key simplify the user experience without endangering your data (its easy to hit a single button by mistake but a combo is much harder to accidentally push)? Not sure of the point to this story, Bill Gates doesn't like it... who cares. And Ctrl+Alt+Delete was for rebooting the machine not specifically for starting a program unless it had its own boot environment.

 

[sean1357]

Windows 8 couldn't sale much, so he blames IBM for that...

 

[weierstrass]

How about writing less buggy software and making the combination useless?

 

[Kieran Warren]

they still could have changed it to a single button years ago. Just have support for both so that old keyboards can do ctrl+alt+del and the newer ones would do button 'x'

 

[dextermat]

I think Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a great mistake. On windows 98, if you do it twice, it reboots the computer. How many times did win 98 froze and the only thing that worked was "Ctrl+Alt+Delete"

Same thing with xp, vista, 7 and 8. If your trouble shooting, removing viruses. Most of the time it's a great tool!

 

[giovanni86]

That combination is used by me more than a hundred times.. More likely I've hit those 3 keys thousands or even a million times. It does what it was intended to do. Get me out of pickles with my PC.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

The suggestion that Ctrl-Alt-Del could have been replaced with a single key is ignorant of its function. I don't care who is saying it!

 

[AMDRadeonHD]

It's awesome what people learn in life.

 

[anonymous_user]

"Bill Gates left Microsoft Gates stepped down from his position as CEO of Microsoft"

Ummm what?

 

[stevejnb]

Meh, I'm with whoever designed the IBM keyboard. Ctrl-alt-delete as one button would be worse than the accidental clicks of the sleep mode buttons some keyboards have. Huge pain in the arse and then you're trying to figure out what the heck happened as your screen suddenly goes blank.

 

[brucen13]

It may have been a bigger mistake for Microsoft to get the single key function. At least it takes a conscious effort to hit Contl-Alt-Del instead of fat-fingering a single button. Oops! Grrrr... Damn!

 

[newbie_mcnoob]

He also said that "640 KB of RAM is more than you will ever need" was IBM's fault.

 

[stevejnb]

Actually Newbie, he went on record and claimed he never said that. Maybe true, maybe not... Who knows?

 

[DRosencraft]

I think making it a single button would be fine, depending on where you put it. All it does ctrl+alt+del does is open up Task Manager (older OS iterations potentially restart your PC). It doesn't automatically change anything, and all you would need to prevent such accidents is what is common now anyway, which is a prompt asking if you're sure about doing whatever it is you're doing. Putting a single button up by the F keys would keep it out of the way - how likely is anyone to accidentally press an F key? But either way, it's not really a big deal.

 

[hiryu]

Single key to replace Contl-Alt-Del would cause more problem. In DOS era, the combination would instantly warm reboot the computer. Accidentally pressing the single key would mean someone would lost the unsaved work, or even worse, if the computer reboots while writing on the disk, it would corrupt the file and lost the whole thing.

 

[GoldenI]

Who is responsible for making Alt + F4 enlarge your screen?

 

[blppt]

"He also said that "640 KB of RAM is more than you will ever need" was IBM's fault."

I think that could be blamed on Intel, not IBM, with its segmented memory architecture x86 chips (640K low memory, 384K high memory in the first MB).

Still wonder what the computing world would be like had IBM chosen the 68000 for its PC like the engineers originally wanted. Oh well.

 

[Zaxx420]

Ctrl+Alt+Del on a single key...too easy to hit it by mistake imo.

 

[lsc]

Wait a moment... is he saying that he wanted a single button to do what Ctrl+Alt+Del did back in the age of DOS and up? Ok, how many people here accidentally hit the "Windows" key while in the middle of something and screamed out loud in profanity? How many developers and apps made an option to shut off the "Windows" key to protect us from the critical moments where an accidental Shift, Ctr, or Alt, was mistyped by one key? I like my Ctrl+Alt+Del dammit!

 

[rolli59]

IBM should be happy to take the blame for that, just imagine all the people screwing up their computers by mistake if it was a single keystroke!

 

[Antimatter79]

I'm fine with ctrl+alt+del; I don't even mind doing it with one hand, so my pizza hand doesn't get grease on the keyboard.

 

[badaxe2]

Out of all the things Microsoft could've owned up to regarding mistakes with Windows, they pick something that wasn't even a mistake at all, and then blame it on someone else?

 

[none12345]

Heh a single button would have been absolute stupidity. The windows keys are already bad enough when you accidentaly hit them and it boots you out of the application youw ere in to pull windows up. I have physically ripped the windows keys, and sleep keys, etc off of keyboards before because those one touch buttons do more harm than good.

A reboot function should require more effort then a single key press. Ctrl+alt+delete is pretty much impossible to accidentally hit, but its very easy to do. Whats the problem...i think its perfect.

 

[nicodemus_mm]

I'm kinda glad it's not a single button. CTRL+ALT+DEL has meaning to some of us. Aside from reset or flipping the switch on the PSU it's the closest thing to being able to give a PC "the finger". When I CTRL+ALT+DEL I mean it. A single button would just ruin the experience.