Bill Gates Called It A Mistake. You Still Press It Every Day

You press it every time your computer freezes. It was never meant for you. In 1981, IBM engineer David Bradley spent about ten minutes writing a small routine for the first IBM PC. It let a few engineers restart their crashing prototypes without waiting for the memory test. Three keys, chosen so nobody could press them by accident: Control, Alt, Delete. This is the story of how that shortcut escaped the lab. It starts in a small IBM office in Boca Raton, spreads through Compaq and the clone makers, gets taken over by Windows, becomes the security lock on every office login, and ends with Bill Gates telling a Harvard audience in 2013 that "it was a mistake." In this documentary: Why IBM's engineers were rebooting every five minutes in 1981 The first key combination they tried, and why it failed How Compaq copied the IBM BIOS without ever looking at it The Windows 3.1 screen that Steve Ballmer wrote himself Why Windows NT made you press Ctrl+Alt+Del before logging in The single button Microsoft wanted and IBM refused to give The 2001 panel where Bradley joked about Bill Gates, and Gates was not amused Was it really a mistake? Mistake or genius? Tell me what you think in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and software that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every two days. #CtrlAltDelete #IBMPC #BillGates #Microsoft #Windows #ComputerHistory #TechHistory #RetroComputing #MSDOS #IBM #Compaq #PCHistory #Documentary #PartsThatChangedHistory