Bizzare Facts

The legendary three-finger salute, **Ctrl+Alt+Delete**, the universal command for summoning the task manager or restarting a frozen computer, was never intended to be a combination. It was designed in the early **1980s** by **David Bradley**, a lead engineer on the original IBM PC team, who had intended for the computer to have a single, dedicated 'reset' button that developers could use during system testing.

Bradley realized that placing a single, easily pressed reset button on the keyboard would be a nightmare. Any accidental bump could wipe out a user's progress. To prevent this, he chose the three-key combination, requiring the use of both hands to execute the command. This deliberate awkwardness made an accidental system crash nearly impossible.

While Bradley invented the sequence, **Bill Gates** later popularized it, saying in a famous interview, 'We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the keyboard at IBM wouldn't give us the single button.' Bradley, however, proudly maintained that the three-key approach was a necessary safeguard. It remains one of the most recognizable and frustrating commands in computing, a deliberate feature born of careful, anti-accidental design.