“Bill Gates has described the decision to use Ctrl+Alt+Del as the command needed to log on to a PC as a mistake,” BBC News reports. “Originally designed to trigger a reboot of a PC, it survives in the Windows 8 operating system as the command to access the task manager toolbar and is still used in older versions to log on. In an interview, the Microsoft co-founder blamed IBM for the shortcut, saying he had favoured a single button.”
“The keyboard shortcut was invented by IBM engineer David Bradley. Originally he had favoured Ctrl+Alt+Esc, but he found it was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer accidentally so switched to Ctrl+Alt+Del because it was impossible to press with just one hand,” The Beeb reports. “During IBM’s 20th anniversary celebrations, he said that while he may have invented it, Bill Gates made it famous.”
The Beeb reports, “Speaking at a fundraising campaign at Harvard University, Mr Gates said he thought that it had been a mistake. ‘We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Tom Warren reports for The Verge, “Control-Alt-Delete isn’t the only recent mistake admission by Bill Gates. Earlier this year the Microsoft chairman admitted that the software maker didn’t nail the mobile market when it had the opportunity. ‘We didn’t miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn’t allow us to get the leadership,’ said Gates at the time, before admitting the strategy was ‘clearly a mistake.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Windows was a mistake.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
