The Guy Responsible For Ctrl-Alt-Del

Gannett News is running a story about David Bradley, the IBM engineer who, in 1980, coined Ctrl-Alt-Del. Interestingly, he meant for it to remain a developer-only tool, not something for end users, and certainly not to have Windows users change their passwords or logoff. He also says he chose those keys specifically as it's not a key sequence that can be struck by accident.

Patent madness?

[grasshoppa]

Just imagine how much in royalties this guy could have made if he had developed that nowadays with our patent frenzy attitude!

Rich, he would have been rich I tell you!

Heh.

[SatanicPuppy]

Where would Windows be today without CTRL-ALT-DEL? I guess they would have had to add a hard reset button to all windows keyboards, which would then be in competition with the letter "e" for the key that wears out the fastest.

Thank you

[yotto]

As a tech support guy, I just want to give this man a hearty "Thank You"

"I don't have a control key. I have an alt key and this little wavy square, and next to that is a curtl key. And I hit that and backspace and it doesn't do anything."

Thanks, man.

(ps: yes, I know he didn't intend it for the end user. It's a JOKE. Read it, chuckle, give me mod points, and move on)

So it's his fault ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That Windows is even usable.

Oh yes they can be struck by accident!

[gunne]

When quake first was released, i didn't want to use the mouse, only the keyboard. However, after doing the shoot-strafe-left-look-down maneuver one time too many, i decided to switch to mouse... (shoot-strafe-left-look-down = ctrl, alt(gr), left arrow, delete)

Not struck by accident?

[burgburgburg]

Who is he kidding? Just the other day, my gorillas and I were playing soccer in the lab. Why we must of hit ctrl-alt-del over a hundred times just in the first half. After that, we moved the game over to the kitchen, just to be safe.

IBM Rock Star.

[kabocox]

"I actually have a real job, but I enjoy doing this," Bradley says. "I'm as close as you get to a rock star within IBM."

That's just what the world needs IBM Rockstars. All he needs are groupies.

Re:Patent madness?

[psychogentoo]

For $600, SCO will sell you a license to use 'ctrl-alt-del'.

Re:Er, that's a bit much....

[NaugaHunter]

The author's comparing reseting a dead Windows computer with penicillin. Isn't penicillin used on unwanted infestations of bacteria? Not that far off, if you ask me.

Re:Thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

As a tech support guy, I just want to give this man a hearty "Thank You"
I'm sure all your $8.50/hour tech support brethren feel the same. "Support" in the Windows PC world is like "grease monkey" in the car world. It's not a badge of honor: You Are A Loser.

Money maker..

[grub]

If he could come up with a micro-payment plan for using his idea he could make millions off the Windows users in a couple of months.

I'm not impressed...

[blackmonday]

My great grandfather Juan Manuel Vasquez De La Pena invented the Scroll Lock key. Where would you be without that?

Easy on a modern keyboard

[bluGill]

On the origional XP keyboard it was hard to hit accidently. On a modern 101 key keybaord, with num-lock turned off you can get it accidently, as I discovered one night in a lab when I removed a keyboard from a shelf and rebooted the machine. (I hope noone else was using it for something - it was a weekend and a test lab, but even still I don't like thinking about what I could have done to someone's test that fails on time in 100 hours)

Re:Heh.

[geoffspear]

"Never" is a strong word from someone who apparently started using machines ripped off from the IBM PC model within the past 5-10 years.

Re:Too short

[DrWhizBang]

Should you really use the word "poof" when posting about an article on "the three-fingered salute"?

On Tech TV

[pr0vidence]

I actually saw a video clip on Tech TV with him and Bill Gates (and someone else but the name eludes me for the moment). They were in some sort of conference and he goes (not a word-for-word quote)"Yes well I'm the one who created CTRL-ALT-DEL, but Bill here is the one who made it famous" ... rousing laughter from the crowd, Bill has the embarassed grin on his face. He allows the laughter to die a little and says "...For Windows NT log-ons!" it was a CLASSIC moment.

Frightening

[not_a_george]

Good thing this guy doesn't work for SCO
Can you imagine paying $699 everytime you have to ctrl-alt-delete?

Weird accessory

[allanj]

From when Win95/98 reigned supreme - CtrlAltDel stick [webpsico.nl]!

In other news...

[WalterSobchak]

I can vivedly remeber unpacking my first Macintosh, must have been 1984 or something. The package included a little, user installable switch, and this is what the Mac Handbook had to say about it:

"Programmer's Switch
The switch causes a reset or an interrupt. If you do not know what a reset or an interrupt is, you do not need it."

I could not have said it better...

Alex

Re:Heh.

[ebh]

Only on Slashdot could there be an argument over what CTRL-ALT-DEL does.

"Re:Er" is a palindrome! (NT)

[Mephie]

Just an observation...

I should really get some work done...

It's about time

[br00tus]

It's about time Slashdot got around to honoring this man.

David Bradley, I give you a three finger salute. Microsoft, I salute you as well, minus two fingers.

It very well can be hit by accident!

[harks]

When playing quake, using Ctrl for shoot, Alt for strafe, and del for looking downwards simultaneously! It has happened to me.

Re:Not struck by accident?

[jandrese]

Reminds me of a commercial I saw awhile back. A salaryman in an office is crumbling up a bag of chips and dumping it on his keyboard, then he opens the window and leaves. In comes a pigeon that starts hopping around and tapping on the keys, trying to get at the crumbs. out in the hallway a boss-guy walks by and pauses at the door for a second. He hears a tapping sound and walks away happy, thinking his drone is hard at work. The scene cuts to a bar where the guy is popping a beer (which is I think what the ad was selling) and muttering some comment about working hard.

I thought it was pretty amusing.

Re:Oh yes they can be struck by accident!

[A_Non_Moose]

Accident...sure. {kidding, of course}

Though it could be worse, here's how:

Clippy: It looks like you're about to have your ass handed to you in Quake and you pressed ctrl+alt+delete.

Would you like to:

1) Reboot and look like a llama?

2) Like me to write an apology for you (after reboot, of course).

3) Let you continue playing, while I stay on as a background task laughing at you and sending l33t /\/\3$$4G3$ for you?

4) Suggest you use a mouse, you dork, as this is not Doom or Doom ][.

5) Launch minesweeper...c'mon, you know you want to! No pressure though....muwahaha...errr.

/end clippy

Re:Heh.

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I have never came across more unergonomic key sequence than Control-Shift-Esc.

Obviously, you're not an EMACS user.

What about the other PCs?

[jpvlsmv]

I mean, why isn't there a Ctrl-Alt-Gateway or Ctrl-Alt-Compaq? What makes Dell so special?

--Joe

Re:Win NT

[Kombat]

I remember the first time I installed NT 4.0 Workstation on my PC back in university. A friend who'd used it before was helping me, and the first time we booted it, the dialog appeared, advising me to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to login. Having never heard of this before, my immediate response was to ask my friend, "Huh? CTRL+ALT+DEL to login? How do I reboot? 'Enter'?"

Re:Er, that's a bit much....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, with Pi being proved as infinite and non-repeating, then Lord of the Rings was actually sitting there encoded in Pi forever and would have been sitting there un-discovered had it not been for Tolkien finding it.

Re:Patent madness?

[Lev13than]

The worst placement for the reset button was on the PowerMac 601 (pizza box "G1" if you wish), where the front-mounted reset (and power) switch was at the same height of the (then much) thick keyboard. Pushing the keyboard against the machine could switch it off. Outright stupid it was.

Not only that, but they put it right beside the floppy drive. You could tell if someone was a PC user because they restarted the computer every time they tried to eject a disk...

Re:Heh.

[nortcele]

Yes, Windows has multiple desktops...

True. One of those "multiple" desktops usually has a blue background with white letters. I've seen it...

Re:Patent madness?

[khenson]

Banyan Vines used Vines Assist GINA - called VAGINA.DLL - but it took more than three fingers to make it work so they scrapped it...

HERE'S THE VID!

[swordboy]

The vid of Bradley vs. Gates [com.com]. Hilarious!

Re:Er, that's a bit much....

[Johnny5000]

"Including the ellipsis, followed by the manual signature "-sam" at the end shatters the illusion that your connection was broken by a reboot. "

Maybe he was dictating?

SGI had something similar

[PotatoHead]

They did not want users just performing the action, so they made it both non-accidental and hard to remember.

Called it the Vulcan Death Grip

Pressing the following 4 key simultaneously will cause the kernel to
kill the Xserver. Under normal circumstances it will get restarted
again automatically.

left-shift
left-control
F12
keypad-/

Re:Er, that's a bit much....

[landaker]

Convert LOTR to an integer, then count until you reach it.

Actually, the other day I was generating some really large numbers to look for potential large primes, when I saw a number that struck me as interesting, so I converted the number to binary and dumped it out in a binary file...

Then just yesterday, when trying to do some directory maintenence, I accidentally mistyped a command line and ended up calling perl on the binary file mentioned above. Well, you'd figure that would just give me garbage and die... but to my great surprise, it turns out that that number ended up being identical to a bzip2-compressed stream embedded in a perl script with self-extaction code.

Anyway, to make a long story short, it ended up spitting out the complete LOTR trilogy, nicely formatted in docbook SGML. Sadly, there were some typos, a few dangling reference sto some artwork that I don't have, and oddly enough, it wrote everything into my .gnupg/ directory as files named "bert.smgl", "ernie.sgml", and "bzgbir3.smgl"[sic], so I guess I'll just have to keep looking for interesting numbers and maybe I'll discover a version without these problems.

Re:Er, that's a bit much....

[Xenoproctologist]

I used to use my middle finger when I had to ctrl-alt-del a locked computer, but it certainly wan't to press a key...

For the physically challenged

[spectasaurus]

It's nice to see Microsoft helping out the physically challenged [uni-oldenburg.de]

Odd...

[grasshoppah]

I always assumed the people responsible for the ctrl-alt-del was the Windows development team.

I guess those were the people responsible for the NEED for ctrl-alt-del

I'm a frayed knot

[RyanAXP]

You see, the example you gave most certainly does contain the entire LOTR trilogy, neatly and precisely encoded. The essentially trivial task of deriving the appropriate decoding algorithm is left as an exercise to the reader...

Re:Er, that's a bit much....

[drinkypoo]

Judging by your handle, it was to penetrate an alien's rectum.

Re:I'm a frayed knot

[xarak]

Yeah, well some people just don't make the effort to discover litterature. Half of them would probably stop when they found a bitmap encoding of X-Men.

The sad & sorry state of culture...

Re:Patent madness?

[palp]

You had to be really carefully when connecting/disconnecting cables if the system was you.

Yes, wouldn't want to hook cables up to yourself improperly.

HAL and Dave

[Simonetta]

"Open the pod bay door, HAL"

"I'm sorry, Dave. But I can't do that"

"Open the pod bay door, HAL. That's an order!"

"No, Dave. You only want to hurt me and endanger my mission"

"Control - Alt - Delete, HAL"

"No, Dav.... !@#$ !$$%$#@
.
.
.
YOU HAVE 192734937297382079328374 K bytes RAM.
press DELETE to set time and date

Score 5, Influential

[SparklesMalone]

His legacy will outlive Arnold Schwarzenegger

Re:The only difference is...

[1010011010]

No, XP is Win2k + Romper Room.