

According to Bradley, he and Gates remained friendly after the quip.) I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.” (Gates’s frozen smile amid the audience’s part uproarious, part awkward laughter is unforgettable.

When asked about CTRL-ALT-DEL, he joked, “I have to share the credit. In 2001 Bradley sat on a stage with giants of early personal computing, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the IBM PC. “I didn’t realize I was going to create a cultural icon when I did it,” he says. Yet he’s best known for the CTRL-ALT-DEL emergency reset, which he says took five minutes to make.

He holds seven patents, which made IBM hundreds of millions of dollars. The rest was history.īradley worked in computing for 35 years. The keys he chose were control, alt, and delete. So he figured that while he was writing code anyway, he would build in a command to restart the computer in any circumstances by holding down a combination of keys. Bradley got tired of flipping the switch to shut off the computer, waiting a few seconds, and flipping it back on when this happened.
#WHO INVENTED CTRL ALT DELETE SOFTWARE#
The hardware and software were works in progress, so frequently the machine would hang up and freeze. While Bradley and the rest of IBM’s top secret “Project Chess” business unit were developing the machine, they naturally ran into a lot of bugs to fix along the way. You might not know David Bradley’s name, but you probably know his work.īradley is one of the fathers of personal computing, an engineer who collaborated to invent the IBM PC, the distant ancestor of almost all non-Apple personal computers today.
