![]() ![]() After dinner, industry luminaries, including Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, sat down for a panel discussion. In two decades, the company had moved more than 500 million PCs worldwide. In 2001, hundreds of people packed into the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC. Journalists hailed “the three-finger salute” as a saving grace for PC owners-a population that kept growing. Suddenly, Bradley’s little code was a big deal. As PCs all over the country crashed and the infamous “blue screen of death” plagued Windows users, a quick fix spread from friend to friend: ctrl+alt+del. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when Microsoft’s Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence. Computing would never be the same.Īnd yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley’s shortcut quietly lingering in their machines. ![]() ![]() IBM PC sales would reach into the millions, with people of all ages using the machines to play games, edit documents, and crunch numbers. Marketing experts predicted that the company would sell a modest 241,683 units in the first five years company execs thought that estimate was too optimistic. In the fall of 1981, the IBM PC hit shelves-a homely gray box beneath a monitor that spit out green lines of type. The team managed to finish Acorn on schedule. It was meant for him and his fellow coders, for whom every second counted. Bradley never intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect it to enter the pop lexicon. Bradley chose the keys by location-with the del key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. “It was five minutes, 10 minutes of activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed to get done,” he says. The task was just another item to tick off his to-do list. Five months into the project, he created ctrl+alt+del. “We got to do the design essentially starting with a blank sheet of paper.”īradley worked on everything from writing input/output programs to troubleshooting wire-wrap boards. “We had very little interference,” Bradley says. The close-knit team was whisked away from IBM’s New York headquarters. In September 1980, he became the 12th of 12 engineers picked to work on Acorn. It was an exciting time-computers were starting to become more accessible, and Bradley had a chance to help popularize them. By 1978, he was working on the Datamaster, the company’s early, flawed attempt at a PC. And he didn’t foresee the command becoming such an integral part of the user experience.īradley joined IBM as a programmer in 1975. He never dreamed that the simple fix would make him a programming hero, someone who’d someday be hounded to autograph keyboards at conferences. So Bradley created a keyboard shortcut that triggered a system reset without the memory tests. The tedious tests made the coders want to pull their hair out. “Some days, you’d be rebooting every five minutes as you searched for the problem,” Bradley says. Turning the machine back on automatically initiated a series of memory tests, which stole valuable time. One of the programmers’ pet peeves was that whenever the computer encountered a coding glitch, they had to manually restart the entire system. Instead of the typical three- to five-year turnaround, Acorn had to be completed in a single year. Because Apple and RadioShack were already selling small stand-alone computers, the project (code name: Acorn) was a rush job. His task: to help build IBM’s new personal computer. In the spring of 1981, David Bradley was part of a select team working from a nondescript office building in Boca Raton, Fla. Here's the story of how the key combination became famous in the first place. In 2013, Bill Gates admitted ctrl+alt+del was a mistake and blamed IBM. ![]()
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