

Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1? - ingve
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/09/02/10554253.aspx

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thought_alarm
Ah, yes. The Kobayashi Maru system prompt.

    
    
        - Press ESC to return to Windows, freeze, and restart.
         
        - Press ENTER to return to Windows, crash, and restart.
        
        - Press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to crash, freeze, or restart.

~~~
readerrrr
What would Kirk do?

~~~
SurfScore
Hack the program and change it so Windows surrenders, duh.

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notahacker
It's a pity Ballmer's writing skills weren't deployed for that Win32 regular:

 _This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If
the problem persists, contact the program vendor._

~~~
trentmb
I think I was 4 or 5 when I first encountered that message, and totally
expected the feds to come kick down my front door.

EDIT: I believe I was playing "Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey" at the time.

~~~
nullc
I had a friend who was a BBS sysop while living with his parents. One day he
came home to— "Son, we need to have a talk about the illegal activities on
your computers."

Thus beginning a rather awkward conversation which was eventually resolved, to
his relief, when he eventually realized they'd just seen a crash message on
one of his screens.

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LeoPanthera
I still don't think it's especially well written.

"Press ESC to cancel and return to Windows"

Cancel what? From memory, hitting Escape would just throw you back into the
stuck program and would help you not at all. I guess what is being "cancel"led
is the blue screen, but that's hard to parse for me.

~~~
mhurron
> Cancel what?

What you're currently doing, which is deciding if you'll kill the program or
reboot the whole thing. This isn't rocket science.

> hitting Escape would just throw you back into the stuck program and would
> help you not at all

That depends on if you hit ctrl-alt-del because you thought the app was hung
or if you thought Windows was hung. You might have hit it because you thought
Windows puked but when you saw the Blue Screen you knew it hadn't and maybe
the app hadn't locked up and you're going to go back and give it some more
time.

Either way you had three options, one of them 'Do Nothing' and you might think
otherwise but 'Do Nothing' is a valid option because of why you may have ended
up here.

~~~
sliverstorm
Or, it's always possible you hit it on accident.

~~~
mhurron
Well ctrl-alt-del was picked as a combination because hitting it accidentally
would be very difficult.

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Ecio78
Fast forward to 2014, and we have Exchange crashing the all system with a BSD
_on purpose_ as a final solution to recover from a I/O stuck situation: _the
Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl.exe) will detect those
failure events and intentionally cause a bugcheck of Windows by terminating
the wininit.exe process._ [1]

In the article they say it's an improvement, I'm not 100% sure about it

[1]
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/scottschnoll/archive/2011/04/13/e...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/scottschnoll/archive/2011/04/13/exchange-2010-sp1-and-
windows-bugchecks.aspx)

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FigBug
Does anybody get the comment about Bill not actually sitting on the notebook?
I've re-read the original several times, and it still understand it as Bill
sitting on the notebook.

~~~
protopete
I was confused too, until I clicked all the links in the article and it was
referring to this one:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/10/21/99102...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/10/21/9910264.aspx)

~~~
jaredmcateer
I am still confused, even knowing the authors intent it doesn't read at all
like Bill sat in front of the book making access difficult/awkward, but rather
that Bill literally sat on the book. Especially considering the joke at the
start.

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silbak04
This article reminded me of this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGQsBDSEpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGQsBDSEpk)

Needless to say, I don't think Bill Gates was very happy.

~~~
chrononaut
It doesn't appear to be immediately obvious, but what larger discussion is
that clip from? It looks to be interesting.

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Nilzor
I don't know about you, but if I had written that post, I'd include the before
and after lock screen text.

