Would you believe it
was invented in 5 Minutes and kept as an industry secret for over 10 years?
Hey guys, remember this? It was known by people my age as the
dreaded Blue Screen of Death. It meant a reboot lasting long enough for an
extended trip to the break room. That failing, as it usually did, you called
the IT Dept. and got on their waiting list. In short, work came to a screeching halt for
the better part of the day.
It was my recent connectivity probs that got me on this
kick. With plenty of time to read, I was
immediately drawn to an article by Virginia Hughes in my favorite mag mental_floss. In it I learned that back in 1981 an
IBM programmer named David Bradley, one of an elite group of 12 engineers, was
racing to match RadioShack and Apple who already had PCs on the market.
The group’s pet peeve was the restarts prompted by each
coding glitch. It automatically initiated multiple memory tests that were very
tedious and time-consuming. And some days it occurred every five minutes.
After five months of this, Bradley, in a fit of pique, created
CTRL+ALT+DEL. It involved all of 5 minutes, and he was off to the next 100
items on his to-do list. Bradley chose those particular keys because with the
DEL clear across the keyboard from the others, it was doubtful they’d ever be
struck together by mistake. It was never intended as a shortcut for customers.
It was just for him and his fellow coders for whom every second counted.
Not until 1990 when Microsoft’s Windows soared to dominance
did this neat little trick enter the pop lexicon. As PCs all over the country
crashed with the infamous “blue screen of death,” the quick-fix spreading
wildly by word of mouth was soon hailed by journalists as “the three-finger
salute.”
Okay, so we still get The Blue Screen of Death. But now it
comes with instructions.
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