Back at the time when the PC was designed, having a Reset button as regular key wasn't uncommon. It isn't a work-around, but a definite hook intended to reboot, guaranteed to work in next to all situations. Making it so that Microsoft had to develop a workaround. One may guess it was to allow sales for existing PC users. So the question is rather why Microsoft did not use the special key. At the time Windows was released in 1985 the PC-AT was the actual design, and it did include a special key for exactly this: SysReq - a new and special key to invoke system services of a multiprogramming system. Sorry, that story smells way like made up afterwards. Is it true that ctrl+alt+del only became a thing because IBM would not build Bill Gates a computer with a button specifically for the task manager?Īs if Gates would have had a request for a special key in 1981, when the PC was introduced,for some software that wouldn't be published until 4 years later (1985). If Microsoft wanted a special button for this they could've easily had one without IBM's help. That's wasn't something IBM agreed to add to their keyboards, it was something Microsoft put on their own keyboards and encouraged other keyboard manufacturers to do as well. Just look at the bottom of the keyboard you're using now, there's a good chance you can see a Windows logo key there. Microsoft had no need to ask IBM to put a special button on keyboards for this. On both versions pressing CTRL-ALT-DELETE for a second time would cause the computer to reboot.) With Windows 3.1 it would bring up a screen where you could kill the currently running task, while on Windows 95, and 98 and ME, it would bring up screen where you could select a task to kill. (MS-DOS-based versions of Windows had a different and partial repurposing of CTRL-ALT-DELETE. So they repurposed the CTRL-ALT-DELETE as a special key combination that no application could intercept and that would always bring up a secure screen that users could trust. On the other hand, they needed some way for users to be able to securely login with their username and password without having to worry about being fooled by some program that displayed a fake login screen. Microsoft considered allowing users to easily reboot the their computers with a simple key stroke combination like this undesirable. The use CTRL-ALT-DELETE as a 'secure attention' key was first implemented in Windows NT. This was implemented by the BIOS, so any operating system, like MS-DOS, that used the BIOS services would get this behaviour unless they did something to change or disable it. The original IBM PC used this key sequence to reboot the computer, in case the computer crashed or the user just wanted to boot some other operating system or application. No, CTRL-ALT-DELETE was a thing before there were tasks to manage.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete by Dave Lewis