Bill Gates admits Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake

Microsoft made much bigger mistakes since then:
  • Vista
  • Surface tablet
  • Allowing Skype to supercede keyboard shortcuts in Office
  • Office 2013
  • Removing maps from the Bing Android app
  • Buying Nokia...
 
cpu. said:
I don't understand the reason this is even mentioned. If he need attention, he can go save a whale or something.
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This is the kind of mistake one would give if it was a job interview question of"what would you say your greatest weakness is". Something really minor.

“It was a mistake,” Gates said. “We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t wanna give us our single button.”
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Back with DOS it had no other meaning aside from "reboot", so who wants a single key you can accidentally press to cause your computer to restart? It only became the Secure Attention Sequence with NT onwards, so you can't blame the IBM keyboard designer for that.
 
Allin said:
Microsoft made much bigger mistakes since then:
  • Vista
  • Surface tablet
  • Allowing Skype to supercede keyboard shortcuts in Office
  • Office 2013
  • Removing maps from the Bing Android app
  • Buying Nokia...
Click to expand...

Office 2013 is pretty cool actually.
If you think the Surface tablet was a mistake, remember that Surface 2 is on its way :D
 
km2 said:
This is the kind of mistake one would give if it was a job interview question of"what would you say your greatest weakness is". Something really minor.



Back with DOS it had no other meaning aside from "reboot", so who wants a single key you can accidentally press to cause your computer to restart? It only became the Secure Attention Sequence with NT onwards, so you can't blame the IBM keyboard designer for that.
Click to expand...

See the bolded bit. If it was one key, I would press it regularly....
 
Venomous said:
See the bolded bit. If it was one key, I would press it regularly....
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Tell me about it. When they added the Windows key I remember accidentally hitting that all the time, and it was especially annoying when in a game and having the screen go black for a few seconds while Windows tried to figure out how to handle getting back to the desktop. They also added those Sleep/Wake keys on some keyboards, and sometimes they were positioned around the Page Up/Page Down/Insert/Delete area and got accidentally pressed.
 
km2 said:
Back with DOS it had no other meaning aside from "reboot", so who wants a single key you can accidentally press to cause your computer to restart? It only became the Secure Attention Sequence with NT onwards, so you can't blame the IBM keyboard designer for that.
Click to expand...

This. The original combination was ctrl + alt + esc but they changed the esc key to del because it was to easy to accidentally hit all three keys with one hand and reboot your machine. One button would be even worse.

If Bill really wanted one button for the NT logon stuff surely he could've used the Windows button?
 
Please read more carefully. Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot wasn't the mistake. Using it as the login sequence was.
 
Sinbad said:
Please read more carefully. Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot wasn't the mistake. Using it as the login sequence was.
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Perhaps you need to read the bit where Bill is putting the blame on the IBM keyboard designer for not having the idea of a login sequence that was dreamed up 10 years later. And the reason it was used as the login sequence was precisely because it was the reboot key, and so they could guarantee that no legacy DOS or Windows apps depended on that key sequence themselves.

Toitjie said:
a lot of Microsoft hate in this thread?
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Nah, just saying that I'm personally grateful they didn't get a single key for it.
 
Clearly not the keyboard designers' fault as km2 said. It was not originally designed for a login sequence.
Anyway it was a good idea to split the key sequence across the keyboard to prevent accidental reboots.
 
Hamster said:
This. The original combination was ctrl + alt + esc but they changed the esc key to del because it was to easy to accidentally hit all three keys with one hand and reboot your machine. One button would be even worse.

If Bill really wanted one button for the NT logon stuff surely he could've used the Windows button?
Click to expand...
:wtf:
 
It was a mistake back then. Now it has a purpose. Probably a good mistake.
 
“It was a mistake,” Gates said. “We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t wanna give us our single button.”
Click to expand...

It was IBM's fault :p
 
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