'Control-Alt-Delete' Was a Mistake, Bill Gates Finally Admits

Making things hard during a time they should be easy.

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Complex Original

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As we grow older, we'll begin to look back at the mistakes of our lives: the girlfriend we wronged, that opportunity we passed up, the friend we lost in touch with, and needless keyboard combinations we included in computers.

Well, that last one was for Bill Gates.

The Microsoft founder recently spoke at a Harvard fundraising campaign, and got around to the subject of the often criticized 'control-alt-delete' combination users had to press in order to reboot their computers or stop a program from running—and Gates is admitting it was a mistake. "We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button," Gates explained, saying that the complicated keyboard combination was implemented to make sure other applications couldn't fake logins and steal passwords. The function is still around, but is just a regular keyboard "shortcut" that people aren't forced to use.

Gates places the blame for 'Control-Alt-Delete' on David Bradley, an IBM worker who helped design the original IBM PC. Bradley, in turn, says that he did invent it, but Gates is the one who "made it famous."

Touché. 

[via Huffington Post]

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