Ctrl-Alt-Del — also known as “The Three Fingered Salute” — is among the most recognizable key commands in the entire computer world. Restarting, or logging into, countless computers since the 1980s.
But how did it come to be?
Let’s take a tour through this history of this loved / hated / mocked key combination.
Not the first multi-key reset
Control-Alt-Delete may be the most famous “reset this computer” key combination… but it wasn’t the first.
That honor goes to the Exidy Sorcerer in 1978. A Z-80 powered home computer that never saw the commercial success of its rivals.
Note the two “Reset” keys in the top right of the keyboard. Ok, that simply is too small to make out. ENHANCE!
Much better.
Here we see the two “Reset” keys. How do you hard reset an Exidy Sorcerer? You press both of these keys.
In theory this was to make it harder to accidentally reset a machine… but… they put the two keys immediately next to each other. Strange, right?
Regardless, the Sorcerer still wins the title of “first computer with a multi-key reset”. So it’s got that going for it.
The IBM 5150
Flash forward to 1981, in Boca Raton, Florida. A team of engineers was about to release the IBM 5150 (aka “The IBM Personal Computer”).
(Yes. The IBM PC was crated in Florida. That random little tidbit doesn’t get talked about much.)
One of the engineers working on the BIOS of the 5150, David Bradley, implemented a three-key reset for the team within IBM (and partners such as Microsoft) to use during development.
A convenience feature that was never intended to see the light of day. Three keys that would quickly reset the entire machine without needing to do a hard “Power off and Power back on”.
That three-key combination?
Control… Alt… Escape.
“Sorry, Lunduke. You wrote that wrong. It’s Control-Alt-Delete. Not Escape.”
Not at first. At first the key combination was “Ctrl-Alt-Esc”. That’s how the IBM 5150 was originally reset.
However, all three of those keys being on the left hand side of the keyboard made it too easy to accidentally bump. So the lead programmer of the project, Mel Hallerman, suggested changing “Escape” to “Delete” (which was on the complete other side of the keyboard). Thus making it much harder to accidentally hit.
It was not supposed to ship
Not only was this feature intended to be strictly used for internal development purposes… it barely received any development time at all.
“It was five minutes, 10 minutes of activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed to get done.” - David Bradley
All that changed when someone included the details of “Ctrl-Alt-Delete” in the technical manuals for the IBM Personal Computer.
Here you can see it documented in the “IBM 5150 Guide to Operations” (where it is detailed not once… but three times):
At which point… the cat was out of the bag. Ctrl-Alt-Delete was now documented and publicly known (and used) by a commercially successful computer.
There was no turning back now. It was a standard. Whether that was the intention or not.
And, to think, we were this close to having Ctrl-Alt-Escape instead. (Let’s just thank heavens we didn’t get stuck with the double RESET keys…)
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Fascinating. And coincidentally, I'm literally reading this in Boca Raton with my old 5150 right next to me.
Companion article on REISUB?