A three-finger salute for David J. Bradley
Posted on September 30, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 45 views |
You’ve probably never heard of David J. Bradley but he’s the guy responsible for the Ctrl-Alt-Delete combination that every Windows user has come to know and hate. However it’s actually a case of good intensions gone bad through over-use by Microsoft. Bradley intended it as a tool for developers who would need to reboot their machines regularly, never to be seen by the average user. Microsoft turned it into the ubiquitous multi-trick pony it is today
“It wasn’t intended as something we were going to tell the customers about,” he says. “Then it turned out that this reset was a problem-solver for people who were writing the programs and writing the instruction manuals.”
…
The original idea was simply to reset early PCs without turning them off. Microsoft adopted control-alt-delete to help ensure people powered down correctly, then to handle “administrative functions” such as the vital “end task” feature for computer software that crashes or otherwise gets stuck.
- Thank this guy for Control-Alt-Delete
I wonder how many computer-related operations that we simply take for granted and accept as a part of using a computer started out as a developer’s tool or hack, never intended for use by the public? I know TBL never expected the average user to have to know or care about URLs when he was designing the unpinnings of the web. What else?
(I don’t intentionally set up to pick on Microsoft, but sometimes they make it just do damned easy).
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