Bill Gates on if he regrets Control-Alt-Delete: 'You can't go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk'
So it's no surprise that Gates had a philosophical answer when pressed at a Bloomberg event today on whether or not he regrets "control-alt-delete," the infamous two-handed keystroke for logging in to or restarting a Windows PC.
"You can't go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk," Gates said, according to a report in Quartz.
However, Gates does go on to admit that if he could change one thing without affecting linear time too harshly, he would have made it a single button.
This isn't the first time Gates has made this point, either: Back in 2013, Gates said that he originally intended for "control-alt-delete" to be a single button, but IBM got in the way. Back around 1980, when the two companies were collaborating on the original IBM PC, Microsoft couldn't get IBM to spare a dedicated button on the keyboard.
This is something that IBM PC co-creator David Bradley once copped to, during a panel discussion at a media event.
"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Bradley said - leaving Gates, also sitting on the stage, looking somewhere between bemused and annoyed.
You can watch that moment here:
For all the second-thoughts about it, control-alt-delete has stuck around: It's still in current versions of Windows 10, now used primarily to access the task manager or to switch logged-in users quickly.
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