B R E A K I N G N E W S . . .

Ctrl+Alt+Del Inventor Retires Today The engineer who invented the Ctrl+Alt+Del keystroke combination is retiring today from IBM, leaving behind his legacy as an inexorable part of the PC experience. David Bradley developed the key combination while working on prototypes of IBM's first PC. He needed a way to quickly reboot the buggy machine because a hard reset--which involved flicking off the power switch and waiting a few moments before retoggling it--took too much time. "The intention was to be cryptic," he said. "It was a key combination that was the moral equivalent of turning the power off and back on again, so it was not an action to be taken lightly. It wasn't something you wanted to happen accidentally." Today, many people use the keystroke combination on a regular basis and not always because the machine has become unresponsive. Microsoft adopted the keystroke combination for use in Windows; today's Windows versions use the combination to let people log on to the system and to bring up a diagnostic screen. "I might have invented Ctrl+Alt+Del but, as I like to say, Bill Gates made it famous," Bradley joked.