The curious history of the Ctrl + Alt + Delete

In the spring of 1981 in the city of Boca Raton, Florida, a team of engineers to develop a new personal computer for IBM - among other things, on the IBM project, codenamed «Acorn» worked programmer David Bradley. All work was carried out in a hurry, because they are direct competitors, Apple and RadioShack, has launched the small compact computer models.



One of the problems that have arisen in the course of the work, was the need to manually restart the system in the event of a software failure. On reboot the device leaving precious moments, recalls Bradley: "Sometimes we have a few days only to those involved and that every five minutes to reboot the machine».

Once David had the idea to assign a shortcut key, which would be to restart the computer without lengthy memory tests. "Everything has been thought up in about five minutes, ten more was spent on implementation of the idea, and then I went back to the hundred other things that needed to get done».

The combination of these three keys were chosen to eliminate the possibility of accidental operation. According to the programmer, he never thought that the combination Ctrl-Alt-Delete, created solely for utilitarian purposes, become the most popular combination of keys in the world.





Work on «Acorn» were completed on time, and in the autumn of 1981 on the shelves of computer stores, a new IBM PC. Sales forecasts were not too optimistic, but in fact this computer has become the first truly mass - millions of people around the world used the PC for work and creativity.

The combination Ctrl-Alt-Delete gained popularity in the early 1990s, when people are faced with the so-called "blue screen of death" - a failure in the operating system Microsoft Windows. The combination of buttons, invented by David Bradley, was used as a universal method of rebooting the PC.





In 2001, hundreds of people gathered at the Technical Museum of San Jose in honor of the 20th anniversary of the release of the first IBM PC: it was the first face of the world computer industry, including Bill Gates, but the first question journalists began asking David Bradley. Humble Programmer answered them: "I should not assign all the credit himself. Yes, I came up with this combination, but it made it famous Bill ».

via factroom.ru