Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time Bill Gates has said that if he could decide again, he would not have chosen CTRL-ALT-DEL as the keypress to interrupt a PC's operations. Speaking at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum, as recorded from about the 8:30 mark in this video, Gates looked a bit amused when Carlyle Group co-founder and CEO David Rubenstein asked …
Ctrl-Alt-Del is detected by the BIOS and generates an interrupt. That's IBM's fault.
It was billg's decision about what to do with that interrupt, if anything, so he is responsible for that. In DOS he chose a reboot. In Win9x he chose a task manager. In WinNT-based Windows he chose to use it to progress through the log-on screen and go to the lock/log off/change password/start task manager screen once logged in.
Did you put the search string in quotes? Second result for me is page 199 of the IBM XT technical reference, listing that section of the XT BIOS.
Oh, so it is.
Real mode, eh? Jumpers for goalposts.
"It was billg's decision about what to do with that interrupt, if anything, so he is responsible for that."
If I remember correctly, there was some malware that looked exactly like the Windows logon screen. It's purpose was to steal your logon credentials. But it was simple. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DELETE would reboot the computer. So Bill and Microsoft decided that to log on to Windows NT, you would have to press those three buttons. If there was that password stealing malware, the computer would reboot. If it was legitimate Windows, it would intercept the call and allow you to log on.
It's called a Trojan login, and it's got a long history. I once wrote one back when I was in school - it looked exactly like the Netware login screen, written in quickbasic. It sufficed to fool our IT head/network manager. Requiring ctrl-alt-del as a preventative measure is effective - the only way to change what those keys do is by altering the interrupt vector list. That can't be done without administrator access, and even then it's tricky because you need to do kernel-level stuff. Your malware would need to be a device driver.
Microsoft is famous for flaky software which needed a frequent three finger salute to reboot it, so Gates' preferred solution would be to add a special key to make the frequent reboots easier. Somehow I think this tells us all we need to know about how Microsoft got their reputation for lack of quality.
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tells us more about the Microsoft haters who will pick up on any pathetic attempt to have a dig"
He has a point though. Why have a single key-press on the keyboard where an accidental press results in a complete system reboot? It really did need to be at least two separate keys far enough apart so as to require both hands to activate. I'm sure we all have experience of desktops, or worse, servers, with badly placed hardware reset buttons that have been inadvertently pressed with knees or other objects.
I think every developer worth his/hers salt wrote some truly awful software in their young age. Bill Gates was unlucky to have that software used by virtually everyone, for a very long time. If people all around the world started using code I've written 25 years ago I would probably die of embarrassment.
Back then the authors of flaky software were the end-users typing programs into the BIOS BASIC interpreter.. the "operating system" was optional.
Microsoft wanted a reset key on the box like an Apple II (the leading micro at the time), but IBM refused because: [1] the reset button on the Apple was often knocked by accident. [2] IBM terminals didn't have a RESET key.
ctl-alt-dev for Windows NT was the mistake, and used to suggest that NT didn't need a RESET key because it could never hang
I think every developer worth his/hers salt wrote some truly awful software in their young age. Bill Gates was unlucky to have that software used by virtually everyone, for a very long time.
I feel obliged to mention that the software in question may have been truly awful by later and even contemporary standards, but was still used because it was less awful than the opposition's software at the time. (Until Microsoft became a monopoly, and then had to basically give away their software to prevent other people from making a business selling less crap software)
I regularly accidentally hit keys that do weird stuff like put browsers into full screen and launch an HTML editor of the page I'm looking at. You'd have to be pretty thick to accidentally hit CTRL-ALT-Del.
I can't find a keyboard old enough but I'm pretty sure there was a Sys Req or Break key on keyboards of old. PP
"I regularly accidentally hit keys that do weird stuff like put browsers into full screen and launch an HTML editor of the page I'm looking at."
I remember a few occasions on mashing a keyboard either accidentally or deliberately and ending up with it in a sort of inverted shift mode, ie normal typing was as if the shift key was pressed while pressing the shift key gave "normal" operation. I never did find out they key combo that caused it or reversed it, or even if it was a keyboard function, BIOS function or an OS function.
I'm glad 'reboot' isn't a single key. Imagine having your fingers on the wrong keys after moving back/forth to and from the mouse all day, you land your fingers just wrong, start to type, and *BOOT*
Making it "non-accidental" is actually a very very good idea.
My home server, in a homebuilt rackmount case because of space constraints, has two toggle switches that need to be actuated (upwards) simultaneously to perform a reset. And they're far enough apart that you can't easily do that with one hand.
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