The History of CTRL + ALT + DELETE
In 2013, Bill Gates admitted ctrl+alt+del was a
mistake and blamed IBM. Here’s the story of how the key combination
became famous in the first place.
In the spring of 1981, David Bradley was
part of a select team working from a nondescript office building in Boca
Raton, Fla. His task: to help build IBM’s new personal computer.
Because Apple and RadioShack were already selling small stand-alone
computers, the project (code name: Acorn) was a rush job. Instead of the
typical three- to five-year turnaround, Acorn had to be completed in a
single year.
One of the programmers’ pet peeves was that
whenever the computer encountered a coding glitch, they had to manually
restart the entire system. Turning the machine back on automatically
initiated a series of memory tests, which stole valuable time. “Some
days, you’d be rebooting every five minutes as you searched for the
problem,” Bradley says. The tedious tests made the coders want to pull
their hair out.
So Bradley created a keyboard shortcut that
triggered a system reset without the memory tests. He never dreamed that
the simple fix would make him a programming hero, someone who’d someday
be hounded to autograph keyboards at conferences. And he didn’t foresee
the command becoming such an integral part of the user experience.
Bradley joined IBM as a programmer in 1975.
By 1978, he was working on the Datamaster, the company’s early, flawed
attempt at a PC. It was an exciting time—computers were starting to
become more accessible, and Bradley had a chance to help popularize
them.
In September 1980, he became the 12th of 12
engineers picked to work on Acorn. The close-knit team was whisked away
from IBM’s New York headquarters. “We had very little interference,”
Bradley says. “We got to do the design essentially starting with a blank
sheet of paper.”
Bradley worked on everything from writing
input/output programs to troubleshooting wire-wrap boards. Five months
into the project, he created ctrl+alt+del. The task was just another
item to tick off his to-do list. “It was five minutes, 10 minutes of
activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed
to get done,” he says. Bradley chose the keys by location—with the del
key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all
three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Bradley never
intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect
it to enter the pop lexicon. It was meant for him and his fellow coders,
for whom every second counted.
The team managed to finish Acorn on
schedule. In the fall of 1981, the IBM PC hit shelves—a homely gray box
beneath a monitor that spit out green lines of type. Marketing experts
predicted that the company would sell a modest 241,683 units in the
first five years; company execs thought that estimate was too
optimistic. They were all wrong. IBM PC sales would reach into the
millions, with people of all ages using the machines to play games, edit
documents, and crunch numbers. Computing would never be the same.
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. As PCs all over the country crashed and the
infamous “blue screen of death” plagued Windows users, a quick fix
spread from friend to friend: ctrl+alt+del. Suddenly, Bradley’s little
code was a big deal. Journalists hailed “the three-finger salute” as a
saving grace for PC owners—a population that kept growing.
In 2001, hundreds of people packed into the
San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation to commemorate the 20th anniversary
of the IBM PC. In two decades, the company had moved more than 500
million PCs worldwide. After dinner, industry luminaries, including
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, sat down for a panel discussion. But the
first question didn’t go to Gates; it went to David Bradley. The
programmer, who has always been surprised by how popular those five
minutes spent creating ctrl+alt+del made him, was quick to deflect the
glory.
“I have to share the credit,” Bradley joked.
“I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.”
