Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has acknowledged that setting Control-Alt-Delete as a way to log in to Windows was a mistake. Gates made the comment during a talk at a Harvard University fundraising event.
“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 … and so we programmed at a low level … it was a mistake,” said Gates.
During an hour-long interview with David Rubenstein, Gates also spoke about his early days at Microsoft, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and his friendship with Warren Buffet.
During the interview, Gates also claimed the two companies did some clever things too. “We were able to experiment with a lot of stuff, but more on the software side than the hardware,” said Gates.
Gates attended Harvard as an undergraduate. However, he dropped out to start Microsoft. Decades later, the university awarded him an honorary degree.
David Bradley, a designer of the original IBM PC, is said to have invented the Control-Alt-Delete. During IBM’s 20th anniversary of the IBM PC, Bradley had reportedly said he may have invented alt-control-delete combination for login, but it was Gates who made it famous.