Posted on 09/21/2017 1:39:29 PM PDT by dayglored
Gives two-fingered salute to IBM designers for forcing us to use three-fingered salute
Bill Gates has said that if he had his time again, he would not have chosen CTRL-ALT-DEL as the keypress to interrupt a PC's operations.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum, as recorded from about the 8:30 mark in this video, Gates looked a touch bemused when Carlyle Group co-founder and CEO David Rubenstein asked about the infamous three-finger salute.
He nonetheless answered the question directly, and in a very Bill Gates way, saying: "The IBM hardware PC keyboard only had one way it could get a guaranteed interrupt generated. So clearly the people involved, they should have put another key on in order to make that work."
Gates also observed that "a lot of machines nowadays do have that as a more obvious function." Rubenstein pressed, asking whether Gates regrets having chosen CTRL-ALT-DEL.
"I am not sure you can go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk," Gates responded, before adding: "Sure, if I could make one small edit I would make that a single key operation."
Gates also used his time on the panel discussion to take a small swipe at "Silicon Valley billionaires who want to live forever", saying that his current focus is on problems such as the fact an African child is 100 times more likely to die of a preventable disease than an American child. He also opined that the "digital revolution" has many years to run, with effects aplenty to be felt across all industries. ®
The three-finger-salute was the work of IBM engineer David Bradley, who programmed the original IBM PC BIOS to forcibly trigger a system reboot when the keys were pressed – and there wasn't much Microsoft could do about it.
In 2001, at a party marking the 20th birthday of the IBM PC, Bradley, while sitting next to Gates, quipped to his audience: "I have to share the credit [for ctrl-alt-del]. I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.”
The Redmond billionaire was not amused.
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My XPs have died, but I still have a very solid 98SE/DOS6 machine running on which I do all of my CAD work rapidly, smoothly, and securely.
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This is only funny because it's true.
A properly designed system should only be rebooted if you need to patch the kernel, or when you do hardware mods.
My two home boxes: The first was shutdown after we had a power outage here that ran for more than 30 minutes. (My UPS will run for about an hour but I have a 30 minute threshold to power off in case of a long term outage.) The 2nd was a hardware change.
$ uptime 19:20:17 up 110 days, 4:24, 7 users, load average: 0.20, 0.32, 0.25 $ ssh remote15@pine64 uptime 19:20:34 up 116 days, 22:11, 2 users, load average: 0.63, 0.59, 0.53 $
Windows has made progress in the last few years on this front, but it is still far too sensitive to minor software changes.
It would be dumb to have such an easy way to delete things. I’m glad it takes three keys.
The ‘red candy-like button!’
Actually Gates never said that. In fact, he pushed for more memory from the beginning. The 640KB limit was built into the IBM-PC architecture before Gates was part of the PC picture. It was strictly an IBM design decision, and Gates and Microsoft thought it was stupid from the get-go. But the 8088 CPU could only address 1MB of memory and at the time, allocating 2/3 of that for RAM was considered a reasonable hardware decision. The software folks hated it, though.
Nah, here's the real story. MSDOS had to be compatible with CP/M, which used the forward slash (/) as a command option flag. At the time, Microsoft was a UNIX house -- they were the providers of XENIX, one of the most widely used UNIX variants at the time.
Microsoft's programmers said, "To hell with CP/M compatibility, go with the UNIX/XENIX convention of forward slash for directory separator, hyphen for command options, and backslash for the escape character."
But Marketing won the battle, and MSDOS used CP/M's forward slash for command options, forcing the use of backslash for directory separator, and no escape character. Terrible, terrible.
But interestingly, in the early days of MSDOS, there were a couple of little-known ways to get around it, put there by the XENIX programmers. You could set environment variables ESCHAR and SWITCHAR to values and MSDOS would use them instead of the defaults.
So folks like me would have an AUTOEXEC.BAT that included:
set ESCHAR=\
set SWITCHAR=-
And we could type command lines that looked normal to UNIX folks.
Moreover, if you were programming in C or similar languages, all the system calls of MSDOS and later of Windows (it's still true today) will accept forward slash as a directory separator.
I agree the use of backslash for directory separator is a travesty. But it's not going away anytime soon....
#21 The alphabetical ABCDEF... etc keyboard makes the most sense!
Qwerty and Dvorak are just scrambled letters to me!
I was there chatting with the child's father when it happened. Very embarrassing! Early to mid 80's on a 4341, if memory serves.
I wouldn't be surprised if IBM put some protection in place later, but I haven't had my hands on an IBM mainframe in almost 30 years.
Modern PCs have a facility called ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), which, among other things, allows the OS to trap and handle the pressing of the power button. E.g., it could perform an orderly shutdown before powering off. Or it could save a memory image to disk before powering off, thus avoiding a reboot on power-on.
Very good! I'm still using my Windows 2000 laptop for my old Adobe Illustrator. Secured by "Sneaker LAN."
that would actually be stupid
You dont WANT it to be that easy to reboot.
What the heck is that “RUB” key?
Now THAT is a key that could have had a happy ending.
CTRL-ALT-DEL still reboots a Unix/Linux system.
Gates also used his time on the panel discussion to take a small swipe at “Silicon Valley billionaires who want to live forever”, saying that his current focus is on problems such as the fact an African child is 100 times more likely to die of a preventable disease than an American child.
...
Reducing infant mortality is key to stopping the population explosion in Africa.
What? That sounds like the opposite.. Reducing baby deaths is key to STOPPING a population explosion?
What? That sounds like the opposite.. Reducing baby deaths is key to STOPPING a population explosion?
...
True enough, but it’s a well known demographic effect.
Apparently losing a child is powerful motivation for parents to have many children.
Exactly. Duh. If it were one key, you’d be typoing
yourself into a reboot twelve times a day. Stupid. Good thing he wasn’t designing nuclear launch procedures.
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