The history of CTRL + ALT + DELETE

Mental_floss magazine published an article reviewing the history of CTRL + ALT + DELETE: In 1975, programmer David Bradley became an IBM employee. In 1978, he was involved in the Datamaster project, and in 1980, he was selected to join the Acorn project team, which aimed to design a personal computer under a tight schedule that required completion within one year.

At the time, programmers had to manually restart computers when they encountered program failures, followed by automatic memory tests, which were very time-consuming. Therefore, Bradley created a shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+Del, which allowed the system to reset without needing to perform memory tests. He never imagined that this would make him a programming hero. The Ctrl and Alt keys were close together, but Del was on the opposite side of the keyboard, so Bradley thought it was unlikely that the shortcut combination would be accidentally pressed.

The Acorn project team completed the design on schedule, and the IBM PC began selling in 1981. Marketing experts predicted sales of 241,683 units in the first five years, and company executives even considered this forecast overly optimistic. However, the IBM PC eventually sold millions of units. Despite this, few consumers knew about the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Del.

It was Windows in the early 1990s that made Ctrl+Alt+Del famous worldwide. When Windows encountered a blue screen of death, it prompted users to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart the computer. Bradley joked that it was Bill Gates who made Ctrl+Alt+Del a household name.