Ctrl-Alt-Del was a mistake, admits Bill Gates

When Bill Gates was at the helm, Microsoft saw quite a bit of success. However, not all of the former-boss’ ideas were winners. During a talk at a Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates talked about one of his biggest mistakes with Microsoft’s Windows operating system—Ctrl+Alt+Del—according to Geekwire.

Gates admitted that it was a mistake to make users hit the infamous button combination whenever they wanted to log into their computers. He said this in response to Harvard Campaign co-chair David Rubenstein’s question. “Why, when I want to turn on my software and computer, do I need to have three fingers on Control, Alt, Delete?” asked Rubenstein. “Whose idea was that?”

Gates responded: “You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software — actually hard-coded in the hardware — that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it’s able to do that.”

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Gates said that the original plan was to have a single button for this command. However, the keyboard designers at IBM didn’t want to add an extra button for Microsoft, so the latter decided to go with the Ctrl+Alt+Del combination of buttons. “It was a mistake,” Gates said.

Bill Gate’s talk at the fundraising campaign was to celebrate the launch of the Harvard Campaign. Other topics of hour-long discussion include Gates’ early days at Microsoft and his later days at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.