Bill Gates admits CTRL-ALT-DEL was mistake, as was dropping out of Harvard

September 26, 2013

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates acknowledged that the “CTRL-ALT-DEL” means of logging into your Windows PC was a mistake, although done with the best of intentions. Gates, interviewed at Harvard University last week, said that the awkward three-finger combination was actually implemented for security purposes. ”Basically 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—that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect,” Gates said. “Instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like your login screen and listens to your password and is able to do that. ”So we could have had a single button, but the guy that wanted to do the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button.,and so we programmed at a low level... it was a mistake.” Gates also said that it was able to take the IBM character set and do some “interesting things” with it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049623/bill-gates-admits-ctrl-alt-del-was-mistake-as-was-dropping-out-of-harvard.html#tk.rss_all