Gates tells of his life’s key error

UNITED STATES: Bill Gates has one regret. If the Microsoft founder could go back and change one thing in his life he would never have introduced the Ctrl+alt +Delete command. Office workers would be better served by a single key, he has admitted.

Asked about the three-finger shortcut at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York, he said: ‘‘I’m not sure you can go back and change small things in your life without putting the other things at risk.

‘‘Sure, if I can make one small edit, I’d make that a single key operation. Clearly, the people involved, they should have put another key on in order to make that work.’’

Ctrl+alt+delete is used to log into a PC or to access the ‘‘task manager’’ to shut down programs that have frozen.

It was developed by the IBM engineer David Bradley to enable colleagues to reboot their computers and wasn’t intended for the public’s use. However, ordinary users quickly caught on and Microsoft co-opted the command to reboot its Windows operating systems.

Gates has previously blamed Bradley for the awkward design. Speaking four years ago, he said: ‘‘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.’’

Nevertheless IBM’S defenders argue that Ctrl+alt+delete was a practical solution for the engineer’s fellow coders and if Gates didn’t like it for Windows users, he had more than enough clout to have a streamlined alternative.

Bradley created the command in 1980 or 1981 – he doesn’t remember which – when he was on the team building IBM’S first computer. – The Times