Ctrl+Alt+Del: keyboard’s holy trinity

Many times we are saved by the holy trinity of the keyboard ctrl+alt+del. However this wasn’t always the case since it was invented in 1981, but computers existed before that. What was the need that caused the creation of the safety keys on our keyboards? It was early 1981 and David Bradley was a programmer in IBM’s team that had to design the new personal computer. It was a project that had to be completed fast because Apple had already started selling their computers.

One of the difficulties he faced was the manual reboots he had to do on the computer he was working until he discovered what the problem was in his code. If you consider that he had to reboot the system every 5 minutes, then you would feel resentment aswell. In order to make it easier for him and his colleagues, Bradley made a shortcut on his keyboard that would reboot the system. In the begining he chose the keys ctrl+alt+del, but soon he realised an accident could take place and force a reboot so he changed the combination to ctrl+alt+del.

When he made this shortcut, he couldn’t imagine that it would be a command that all pc owners would use.

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