

The History of Ctrl + Alt + Delete - shill
http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=51674

======
mjn
_And yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley’s shortcut quietly
lingering in their machines. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when Microsoft’s
Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence._

In an indirect sense it came to prominence in the 1980s, but via Apple. Apple
borrowed the CTRL + ALT + DEL soft-reset idea by adding a CTRL + OPEN APPLE +
RESET soft-reset functionality to the IIe (the 1983 upgrade of the Apple II
series). That became fairly well-known, even (or perhaps especially) among
schoolkids.

~~~
bsimpson
I'm from the Macintosh generation, but I remember it being Apple-Option-Esc to
force quit and Apple-Ctrl-Power to restart.

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ScottBurson
I've always wondered whether the creator of Ctrl-Alt-Del was aware that the
MIT Lisp Machines were rebooted with Ctrl-Meta-Ctrl-Meta-Rubout, or if this is
just a case of convergent reinvention. Does anyone know?

~~~
patmcguire
I can't verify, because I can't find old WordPerfect docs, but I remember
hearing that CTRL + ALT + DEL was save for WordPerfect. The hint was that MS
chose that as a monopoly-extending tactic. Might be thinking of ALT + F4,
though, and this might be total nonsense.

~~~
michaelhoffman
If you read the article you will find that Ctrl+Alt+Del was selected by an IBM
employee, not Microsoft.

Alt+F4 I believe was also picked by IBM as part of the Common User Access
standard.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access)

------
undershirt
CTRL+SHIFT+ESC does what CTRL+ALT+DEL used to do -- goes straight to the task
manager.

CMD+ALT+ESC on mac, btw.

~~~
Udo
_> CMD+ALT+ESC on mac, btw._

That goes to Force Quit, whereas CTRL+ALT+DEL on old Windows used to open the
real task manager the Mac equivalent of which would be Activity Monitor
(sadly, there doesn't seem to be a default shortcut to it).

~~~
D9u

        CTRL+ALT+DEL on old Windows used to open the real task manager
    

Really? Define _" old Windows?"_

I have vague memories of the "three finger salute" invoking a reboot on
Windows 3.1, as well as MS-DOS. (early 1990's)

~~~
Udo
It wasn't supposed to be an insult. My last Windows experience was XP and the
TFS invoked the Task Manager on that OS. I never used 3.1, so I don't know.
But the GP seemed to suggest that the Task Manager shortcut has changed in
newer versions.

~~~
Zarel
Windows 95, 98, and Me used Ctrl+Alt+Del for Task Manager.

Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, etc use Ctrl+Shift+Esc for Task Manager, while
Ctrl+Alt+Del was reserved for the lockscreen.

What was confusing, though, was that Windows XP (and ONLY Windows XP, not 2000
or Vista) in default settings would use Ctrl+Alt+Del for Task Manager,
although in domain mode Ctrl+Alt+Del would still open the lockscreen.

------
mnemonicsloth
Bradley -- Dr. Bradley -- taught my section of Digital Logic Design at NC
State. Ace the final and he'd autograph your keyboard.

~~~
greyboy
He was an interesting teacher. Not the most forgiving, however. One learned
not to ask him a silly question.

------
ctdonath
Didn't address how the "system is screwed up, restart" sequence was adopted as
the "do this to initiate first login".

~~~
panic
_When we were designing NT 3.1, one of the issues that came up fairly early
was the secure attention sequence - we needed to have a keystroke sequence
that couldn 't be intercepted by any application._

 _So the security architect for NT (Jim Kelly) went looking for a keystroke
sequence he could use._

 _It turned out that the only keystroke combination that wasn 't already being
used by a shipping application was control-alt-del, because that was used to
reboot the computer._

 _And thus was born the Control-Alt-Del to log in._

 _I 've got to say that the first time that the logon dialog went into the
system, I pressed it with a fair amount of trepidation - I'd been well trained
that C-A-D rebooted the computer and...._

\-
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/01/24/359...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/01/24/359850.aspx)

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RankHorror
Funny that this article seems oblivious to the fact that Ctrl-Alt-Del was used
during the MS-DOS era by all users.

Revisionist history from someone who clearly wasn't even there.

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WalterBright
> And yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley’s shortcut quietly
> lingering in their machines. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when
> Microsoft’s Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence.

What? I've programmed the PC since 1982 or so. Everyone knew about C-A-D.

~~~
marshray
Agree, this article is factually incorrect. Everyone who used DOS experienced
crashes from time to time and quickly learned about Ctrl-Alt-Del. This was not
a Windows thing.

It was sent by the keyboard controller of the PC/AT.
[http://zet.aluzina.org/images/d/d4/8042.pdf](http://zet.aluzina.org/images/d/d4/8042.pdf)
"Bit 0 of the keyboard is connected to System Reset..." But I think it may
have been a pure BIOS thing in the PC/jr/XT.

It was the only way to get a hardware non-maskable interrupt from the user and
thus became the basis for the "secure attention key" sequence you had to hit
before you type your password on Windows NT. AIUI, this was an Orange Book
security requirement.

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Aardwolf
Hmm, it's a very long time ago that I pressed that key combination. I tried it
out, and apparently it is wired to the Logout function of KDE...

~~~
dhruvmittal
Yeah- it was a pretty standard thing in Desktop Managers for a while for
<C-Alt-Del> to be logout (or return to DM, depending on what you're using). I
think GDM 3.0+ finally threw it out, but you'll still see it in KDM, LightDM,
and Slim.

~~~
laumars
It's not even universal across all KDM et al installs. None of my Arch + KDE4
log out when using ctr+alt+del.

On a side note, ctr+alt+backspace used to kill Xorg (still can if you enabled
it - but these days that shortcut key is disabled by default)

------
pjmlp
What about the CTRL-Left Amiga-Right Amiga on the Amiga systems?!

~~~
mickeyp
That takes me back! I still remember the sound of inserting the floppy disk
and the disk controller reading from it... nostalgia.

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speeder
Bill made it famous with his crashy software that made knowing it needed...

These days of windows 8 I still have to use it regularly because of freezing
programs and OS issues.

~~~
stinos
I'd rather say it's was the crashy software running on top of Windows that
made it famous. Can't even remember last time I needed to use it for a Windows
component itself.

~~~
dllthomas
It's been famous for probably longer than you've been paying attention, then.
Windows stability has made huge strides over the past 20ish years.

~~~
stinos
I know, I've been using it for more than 2 decades :P And I always had the
feeling that the amount of crashes due to actual OS bugs is way lower than
what the common belief seems to be. Way over 90% of problems I witnessed
myself was duewas dues to faulty software, drivers or hardware. And as you say
it just got better with most releases which is (just guessing) partly due to
less OS bugs and partly due to the OS taking better care of dealing with bad
3rd party software.

~~~
laumars
Faulty 3rd party software should never be allowed to cause kernel panics (aka
BSODs)

~~~
dllthomas
That is possibly overstating the case. Depending on demands on performance
and/or control it might make sense to sacrifice some stability... but it
_does_ count against the stability of the system.

