The History of Ctrl + Alt + Delete | Hacker News Reader

The History of Ctrl + Alt + Delete

m.mentalfloss.com

80 pointsshill46 comments

And yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley’s shortcut quietly lingering in their machines. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when Microsoft’s Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence.

In an indirect sense it came to prominence in the 1980s, but via Apple. Apple borrowed the CTRL + ALT + DEL soft-reset idea by adding a CTRL + OPEN APPLE + RESET soft-reset functionality to the IIe (the 1983 upgrade of the Apple II series). That became fairly well-known, even (or perhaps especially) among schoolkids.

I'm from the Macintosh generation, but I remember it being Apple-Option-Esc to force quit and Apple-Ctrl-Power to restart.

I've always wondered whether the creator of Ctrl-Alt-Del was aware that the MIT Lisp Machines were rebooted with Ctrl-Meta-Ctrl-Meta-Rubout, or if this is just a case of convergent reinvention. Does anyone know?

I can't say for sure, but the ending quote from the article

  “I have to share the credit,” Bradley joked. “I may have
  invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.”

seems to support the theory that he reinvented it independently. I'd be interested to know who at MIT picked the key combination Ctrl-Meta-Ctrl-Meta-Rubout for the Lisp Machines.

It was almost certainly Richard Greenblatt, who built the CONS prototype (there was only one built) and then the first CADRs.

I can't verify, because I can't find old WordPerfect docs, but I remember hearing that CTRL + ALT + DEL was save for WordPerfect. The hint was that MS chose that as a monopoly-extending tactic. Might be thinking of ALT + F4, though, and this might be total nonsense.

If you read the article you will find that Ctrl+Alt+Del was selected by an IBM employee, not Microsoft.

Alt+F4 I believe was also picked by IBM as part of the Common User Access standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

I vaguely recall something involving F7 leading you to the save function on WordPerfect. Like it would ask you if you wanted to save, and if you mistakenly answered 'no' all your unsaved work was lost.

CTRL+SHIFT+ESC does what CTRL+ALT+DEL used to do -- goes straight to the task manager.

CMD+ALT+ESC on mac, btw.

> CMD+ALT+ESC on mac, btw.

That goes to Force Quit, whereas CTRL+ALT+DEL on old Windows used to open the real task manager the Mac equivalent of which would be Activity Monitor (sadly, there doesn't seem to be a default shortcut to it).

    CTRL+ALT+DEL on old Windows used to open the real task manager

Really? Define "old Windows?"

I have vague memories of the "three finger salute" invoking a reboot on Windows 3.1, as well as MS-DOS. (early 1990's)

In Windows 3.1, CTRL-ALT-DEL will allow you to kill a hung application. If no application is hung, it will tell you to press CTRL-ALT-DEL again to reboot.

Check this by Raymond Chen where he explains better than me: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/02/08/1039...

It wasn't supposed to be an insult. My last Windows experience was XP and the TFS invoked the Task Manager on that OS. I never used 3.1, so I don't know. But the GP seemed to suggest that the Task Manager shortcut has changed in newer versions.

Windows 95, 98, and Me used Ctrl+Alt+Del for Task Manager.

Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, etc use Ctrl+Shift+Esc for Task Manager, while Ctrl+Alt+Del was reserved for the lockscreen.

What was confusing, though, was that Windows XP (and ONLY Windows XP, not 2000 or Vista) in default settings would use Ctrl+Alt+Del for Task Manager, although in domain mode Ctrl+Alt+Del would still open the lockscreen.

95, 98

I'm stuck in a cycle of continuously rediscovering this, then forgetting it again almost immediately because CTRL+ALT+DEL is so damned ingrained.

Bradley -- Dr. Bradley -- taught my section of Digital Logic Design at NC State. Ace the final and he'd autograph your keyboard.

He was an interesting teacher. Not the most forgiving, however. One learned not to ask him a silly question.

Didn't address how the "system is screwed up, restart" sequence was adopted as the "do this to initiate first login".

When we were designing NT 3.1, one of the issues that came up fairly early was the secure attention sequence - we needed to have a keystroke sequence that couldn't be intercepted by any application.

So the security architect for NT (Jim Kelly) went looking for a keystroke sequence he could use.

It turned out that the only keystroke combination that wasn't already being used by a shipping application was control-alt-del, because that was used to reboot the computer.

And thus was born the Control-Alt-Del to log in.

I've got to say that the first time that the logon dialog went into the system, I pressed it with a fair amount of trepidation - I'd been well trained that C-A-D rebooted the computer and....

- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/01/24/359...

Funny that this article seems oblivious to the fact that Ctrl-Alt-Del was used during the MS-DOS era by all users.

Revisionist history from someone who clearly wasn't even there.

> And yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley’s shortcut quietly lingering in their machines. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when Microsoft’s Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence.

What? I've programmed the PC since 1982 or so. Everyone knew about C-A-D.

Agree, this article is factually incorrect. Everyone who used DOS experienced crashes from time to time and quickly learned about Ctrl-Alt-Del. This was not a Windows thing.

It was sent by the keyboard controller of the PC/AT. http://zet.aluzina.org/images/d/d4/8042.pdf "Bit 0 of the keyboard is connected to System Reset..." But I think it may have been a pure BIOS thing in the PC/jr/XT.

It was the only way to get a hardware non-maskable interrupt from the user and thus became the basis for the "secure attention key" sequence you had to hit before you type your password on Windows NT. AIUI, this was an Orange Book security requirement.

Hmm, it's a very long time ago that I pressed that key combination. I tried it out, and apparently it is wired to the Logout function of KDE...

Yeah- it was a pretty standard thing in Desktop Managers for a while for <C-Alt-Del> to be logout (or return to DM, depending on what you're using). I think GDM 3.0+ finally threw it out, but you'll still see it in KDM, LightDM, and Slim.

It's not even universal across all KDM et al installs. None of my Arch + KDE4 log out when using ctr+alt+del.

On a side note, ctr+alt+backspace used to kill Xorg (still can if you enabled it - but these days that shortcut key is disabled by default)

Ubuntu 13.04 mini-iso with Gnome desktop/shell 3.8 installed, C-Alt-Del brings up a confirmation dialogue asking if I want to log out. GDM appears to be the DM.

Ditto here on Unity, but I got a confirm dialog. On Windows it's still the software interrupt, and on the corporate edition of win7 at work I get "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in" on every boot.

What about the CTRL-Left Amiga-Right Amiga on the Amiga systems?!

That takes me back! I still remember the sound of inserting the floppy disk and the disk controller reading from it... nostalgia.

Bill made it famous with his crashy software that made knowing it needed...

These days of windows 8 I still have to use it regularly because of freezing programs and OS issues.

I'd rather say it's was the crashy software running on top of Windows that made it famous. Can't even remember last time I needed to use it for a Windows component itself.

It's been famous for probably longer than you've been paying attention, then. Windows stability has made huge strides over the past 20ish years.

I know, I've been using it for more than 2 decades :P And I always had the feeling that the amount of crashes due to actual OS bugs is way lower than what the common belief seems to be. Way over 90% of problems I witnessed myself was duewas dues to faulty software, drivers or hardware. And as you say it just got better with most releases which is (just guessing) partly due to less OS bugs and partly due to the OS taking better care of dealing with bad 3rd party software.

Well sure, but faulty software should be limited in its ability to do damage, and I think it's fair to lay some blame at the feet of the OS when it fails to prevent that.

In win98 kernel32 blue screens were pretty common. But I agree that Windows is usually a pretty stable OS with things like 3rd party drivers and software causing most of the issues

Faulty 3rd party software should never be allowed to cause kernel panics (aka BSODs)

That is possibly overstating the case. Depending on demands on performance and/or control it might make sense to sacrifice some stability... but it does count against the stability of the system.

Recent versions of Windows have been incredibly stable. Are you sure you don't have hardware issues?

In Windows, I generally just default to CTRL+SHIFT+ESC which immediately brings up the Task Manager. At work, I'll use WINKEY+L to lock the machine. It's very rare that I actually need to use the CTRL+ALT+DELETE key combination.

> Bill made it famous with his crashy software that made knowing it needed...

And he doesn't seem too proud of it ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGQsBDSEpk

DOS was a real mode operating system, and so any bugs in any software could (and usually did) crash the computer. You can't blame Microsoft for that.

OS issues such as?

Like allowing a poorly coded game hijack your screen and having no way to fix it but using control alt del and hitting keys hoping it will close the offending program...

Or crashes related to Adobe products, or Apple products... I know it is mainly not windows fault, but there are some OSes that are more resilient to stupid programs.

Do you happen to remember what game it was? I haven't seen a case in over a decade where pure user-mode code caused a denial of service type attack on the OS. There is a possibility that kernel-mode DRM crap installed by the game caused problems in your case. When you're in kernel-mode though, all bets are off and no OS can save you.

Also I don't understand what you mean by resilient to stupid programs? A general purpose OS should terminate badly written programs the instant it runs into a crashing-bug.

Try Cntr + Shift + Esc next time ;-)

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