“Ctrl-Alt-Retire”

Here is a nice bit of trivia I found on business2blog.  The Register has reported that David Bradley, the guy who invesnted, amoung other things, the often used keyboard combination and cure for recalcitrant computers, Ctrl-Alt-Del, is retiring:

Ctrl-Alt-Del inventor makes final reboot

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)

Published Thursday 29th January 2004 19:56 GMT

David
Bradley, one of the ‘dirty dozen’ engineers who created the original
IBM PC at Boca Raton, Florida, is to retire this week after 29 years
with the company.

Bradley’s accomplishments are numerous – he wrote the BIOS code for
the original PC and rose to become architecture manager at the PC
group. But David’s claim to fame is that he devised the most famous –
and probably most used – three key combination in computer history:
Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Bradley chose the Delete key
because it was far away from the two modifiers that were necessary to
create the deadly interrupt, he explained 
last year. At first IBM wasn’t going to tell customers about the handy
sequence, but technical writers and developers found it useful, and
word got out.

"I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill Gates made it
really famous," he told a gathering at the twentieth anniversary of the
PC.

This comment brought boundless laughter from the PC loving crowd. Bill Gates did not even crack a smile. ®

Related Link

Bio (https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/Alumni/OECE/1997/bradley.whtml)

   

© Copyright 2005

Love that last bit about Bill Gates.  He can’t have been too amused.  Still, you have to admire something so simple and yet so effective and useful.