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Where did CTRL+ALT+DEL come from?

ledz

Adelaide, South Australia

2977 posts

Ever wondered who came up with the CTRL+ALT+DEL function? Well, thank this bloke for comming up with it:

The original idea was simply to reset early PCs without turning them off. Microsoft adopted control-alt-delete to help ensure people powered down correctly, then to handle "administrative functions" such as the vital "end task" feature for computer software that crashes or otherwise gets stuck.

Bradley chose the control and alt keys because he needed two shift keys to make the operation work, and he chose the delete key because it was on the opposite side of the keyboard. He didn't want people to hit control-alt-delete by accident

Read more of the article here.

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02:00pm 02/10/03 Permalink

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02:00pm 02/10/03 Permalink

DrFrag

Adelaide, South Australia

1306 posts

Back in '87 I had an 8MHz XT. This was when keyboards only had 84 keys, so there was no Enter key on the numeric keypad. The Del key was below the big "+" key.

One day I found all my games were running slower than normal, even the sound was slowed down. It turned out that I had hit Ctrl-Alt-Plus accidently while hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del. Ctrl-Alt-Plus was the "turbo" button before there were turbo buttons on the front of cases (which aren't even around anymore). So this little LED light on the front of the case could be changed with Ctrl-Alt-Plus and toggle the computer between 4.77MHz and 8MHz.

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02:25am 08/10/03 Permalink

tacticus

Alice Springs, Northern Territory

3 posts

ctrl alt del comes from the fact that it is the only keycombernation that can't be sent accross a network
i have no idea why it can't but everyone i have asked says that it can't be sent
probably chosen so that if you remote login to a secure system you can't kill the system

09:22am 21/10/03 Permalink

Snipz

Adelaide, South Australia

322 posts

Bahahah, DrFrag, thats a good storey mate gees 8Mhz would have been pretty fast :)

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10:11am 21/10/03 Permalink

DrFrag

Adelaide, South Australia

1326 posts

ctrl alt del comes from the fact that it is the only keycombernation that can't be sent accross a network
i have no idea why it can't but everyone i have asked says that it can't be sent
probably chosen so that if you remote login to a secure system you can't kill the system

I have a feeling that it can't be put in the keyboard buffer. It became very handy with security with NT logins and access to the task manager, since programmes cannot trigger a Ctrl-Alt-Del (AKAIK). You don't want a virus being able to do those things.

Ctrl-Alt-Del is a very low-level system operation, so it often works when every other key is locked out by a crashed programme. The idea is you can reboot your computer without cutting the power (soft reboot). You may have noticed that soft reboots don't run a memory check.