Bill Gates has finally admited something we’ve known for a long time: control-alt-delete was a mistake. At a Harvard fundraising campaign, he was asked:

When I want to turn on my computer and software why do I have to have three fingers, Ctrl, Alt, Delete?[…] Who’s idea was that?

He actually starts explaining the process behind the infamous “control-alt-delete,” combo, saying that it was put in place to make sure that other applications could not fake the login and steal passwords. He then admits, they could have actually programmed this feature into one button on the keyboard instead of three, saying:

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.

The IBM employee who was responsible for the triple threat log-in feature is David Bradley. Bradley does admit to creating the combo as a computer reset feature, but was quick to distance himself from the creation, saying it was Gates who actually “made it famous.”

[Source: Huffington Post]