Bill Gates Says Control-Alt-Delete Login Was A Mistake

Bill Gates had a chat with David Rubenstein, Harvard Campaign co-chair for a Harvard fundraising campaign. In that Gates revealed that it was a mistake to force users to use hold down “Ctrl+Alt+Del” to log into their computers and he also blamed IBM for doing so.

“You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software — actually hard-coded in the hardware — that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it’s able to do that,” Gates said.

The Microsoft co-founder said that there was an option to make a single button for such a command, but the IBM keyboard designer didn’t want to give Microsoft a single button. So Microsoft decided to use “Ctrl+Alt+Del” as a way to log into Windows.

“It was a mistake,” Gates said, drawing a big laugh from the crowd.

BM engineer David Bradley in an interview told that, “I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,”.