Nobody’s perfect, not even Bill Gates. The billionaire recently admitted that if he could go back in time, he’d switch the Ctrl+Alt+Delete command for a single button.
Gates spoke out on the subject yesterday at a Bloomberg business forum in response to David Rubenstein’s question about why he chose that specific command to access the task manager on a Windows computer.
He blamed the “mistake” on the IBM developers at the time, just as he did in 2013 at a Harvard University event. He pointed to IBM engineer David Bradley as the culprit, someone who’s also had his fair share of questions on the subject. Bradley explained the keyboard was part of a long process, and there was no time to be wasted on small details.
“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. We programmed at a low level — it was a mistake.” Gates explained.
Initially, the command was used by IBM programmers while they developed the system, with no intent of ever being known by the general public. Instead, it became one of the most well-known commands to date.
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So it wasn’t Bill’s intent to make our lives harder, they were just in a rush to finish the first PC.
We can forgive that, right?
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