Who invented ctrl alt delete

In the spring of , David Bradley was part of a select team working from a nondescript office building in Boca Raton, Fla. 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. Turning the machine back on automatically initiated a series of memory tests, which stole valuable time.

The tedious tests made the coders want to pull their hair out. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

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YouTube Instagram Adobe. Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. It hasn't added one to any subsequent keyboard, either. All sorts of other keys have materialized—keys to control media playback, change the volume, adjust the screen brightness, and so on—but a logon key is not one of them. Which is not to say that logon keys have not been tried. While consumer-oriented versions of NT lift the SAK requirement by default, you don't actually need to press ctrl-alt-del to log on, though you can enable the option if you prefer , enterprises tend to stick with it.

This creates a conundrum for enterprise-oriented Windows tablets: how to press ctrl-alt-del on a tablet with no keyboard at all? Their solution is simple: a single key that emulates the pressing of ctrl-alt-del to allow logging on. Microsoft even has a name for such a key: it's called the Windows Security Button. Adding such a key to the keyboard would have been trivial.

It would even sidestep any compatibility issues as falling back to a traditional ctrl-alt-del would always be possible on legacy systems that lacked the key. Microsoft had the power and the opportunity, but it didn't bother. So our question to Bill Gates would be, if you really wanted this button so much, why didn't you do it yourself? IBM couldn't have done it, but Microsoft sure could. Our guess as to the answer? Nobody actually cares that much. Ctrl-alt-del is no hardship, and leveraging a well-known key combination for this kind of feature is, in fact, logical and straightforward.

In the spring of , David Bradley was part of a select team working from a nondescript office building in Boca Raton, Fla. 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. Turning the machine back on automatically initiated a series of memory tests, which stole valuable time.

The tedious tests made the coders want to pull their hair out.