Bill Gates Admits That "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" Was A Mistake

Combining these three specific buttons was always seen as an arbitrary, unnecessary grouping by many Windows users, and in a speech given at Harvard University earlier on this week
, shed some light on its original conception.

In short, an IBM keyboard designer refused to offer a single button for the same purpose, so with some low-level programming already in place, Ctrl-Alt-Del made its way right to the end-user. As time progressed, users had become so accustomed to the feature as both a login measure and a way to bring about the Task Manager that it has simply remained.

As Gates noted:

So we could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button. So we had, we programmed at a low level, eh, it was a mistake.

Gates is not alone in his apathy of Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Many Windows users still find the process of inputting these three magic buttons to be rather tedious.

Watch him here as he explains this...!