Saturday, April 16, 2011

The origin of CTRL-ALT-DELETE

You may not have ever thought about it, but the far-too-often-used keyboard combination of Control + Alt + Delete had to have been brought into existence by some random coder at some point in technological history.


The keystroke combo is attributed to David Bradley.

He was one of the original designers of the IBM Personal Computer.

He came up with the idea after growing weary of waiting for the Power-On Self Test (POST) routine to finish during each reboot of his software testing regiment.

We remember the old days of slow hardware and can understand his frustration at the lost time.
He decided to throw in a shortcut that allowed the software to reboot without power cycling the hardware.

The original implementation used CTRL-ALT-ESC, but was later changed so that one frustrated keyboard mash couldn’t accidentally reboot the system.

11 commentaires:

Daniel Smotherman said...

interesting...

lacrosseman said...

I didn't know that. I figured it had to be invented at some point in time by someone, I just never thought about it.

Unknown said...

Yeah I have done that so many times and never really thought why.

Gambling Degenerate said...

haha wow good read, i never knew this :D

mokujin01 said...

kinda nifty

Uno said...

Pretty crazy, nice post, followed

Unknown said...

Makes sense when you think about it.

mious said...

didn't know that :) nice

Dan said...

Thanks for the info!

Fugazi said...

I just learned something.

Anonymous said...

I never even thought to look this up.
And I do love that shortcut; so damn useful.

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