Bill Gates admits that Ctrl-Alt-Del was a mistake and could have been done with just one button but the keyboard designer messed up



Bill Gates has revealed that the Control-Alt-Delete function for Microsoft computer systems was a mistake that ended up sticking.

The Microsoft founder explained that the same function could have been easily achieved by having users only hit one button on their keyboard but a design flaw required the use of three fingers instead.

'We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't wanna give us our single button,' he said at a talk at Harvard University.

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Oops: Bill Gates admitted that there is no real reason why the Ctrl-Alt-Del function needed to involve three keys but the keyboard designer did not allow it

Three-finger salute: Gates was asked about the quirk during a talk at Harvard, where he dropped out before eventually receiving an honorary degree

The so-called 'three finger salute' has a variety of uses but was originally meant to serve as a sort of 'wake up' call for the computer.

'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,' he explained.

Man behind the move: David Bradley was the keyboard designer who arranged the three button combination

It has been known in tech circles that IBM designer David Bradley was the one to come up with the plan to use three keys rather than one key for that command, but the Harvard talk was the first time that Gates readily admitted that it was a mistake.

Bradley spoke about the design quirk years ago at the 20th anniversary of IBM, trying to fairly distribute the responsibility.



'I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,' he said at the time.

Gates didn't let it slip by without eschewing all credit, however, as he went on to praise their keyboard designs.

'We did some very clever things- the IBM PC character set, usually you have 128 characters like the lower case and upper case but we took the upper ones and put like suit symbols in- we were able to experiment with a lot of stuff but more on the software side and not the hardware,' he said.

Gates’ talk was a part of a fundraising event for Harvard, his alma mater.