We’ve all found ourselves in situations when we’re mashing Ctrl-Alt-Del on the keyboard when our Windows PC freezes. We know it by heart and it’s normally the first fix we try when something goes wrong, nevermind the fact that it’s an awkward operation that requires you to use both hands. Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates has never been a fan of Ctrl-Alt-Del and turns out, he still doesn’t like it.
Gates called this a “mistake” back in 2013. He always wanted a single button for this function but “the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button,” he said back then.
For those who are unaware, Ctrl-Alt-Del is a force quit function on Windows. It’s used when the OS freezes. The function also comes in handy when you want to call up the Task Manager or just want to reboot the system.
Speaking at a Bloomberg business forum, Gates maintains that this function should have been easier. “The IBM PC hardware keyboard only had one way that it could get a guaranteed interrupt generated,” he explained when asked about the function.
“So, clearly the people involved, they should have put another key on it to make that work. A lot of machines these days do have that as a more obvious function,” he added.
It seems like if Gates was ever able to travel back in time, he would make sure that this was a single-key function. That’s not going to be possible, though, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Filed in . Read more about Bill Gates, Microsoft and Windows.