Bill Gates: Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake

CNN ^ | 9/26/13 | Doug Gross

[donmeaker]

Why are there no gambling casinos in Africa?

[Mr. K]

ha! I would have killed to have 0’s

[donmeaker]

We used perforated tape for our Radioteletype machine.

It used to go bad quickly inside a metal box in Germany. Humidity let the tape stretch.

It was fun to hold a fluorescent light by the antenna and watch it glow from the induced currents.

[hitkicker]

Back in the old days when it did cause a reboot, my cat walked across my keyboard and hit all three keys. I still think he did it on purpose.

[donmeaker]

Too many Cheetahs/

[Donnafrflorida]

we ran all yellow pages for pennsylvania and a coule of other states with mag tapes. had to wait a long time for tape mounts until i started dating a guy who mounted them. instant presto!! i think he left them permanently up. :)

[donmeaker]

Trash - 80.... Tandy bought radio shack, since a hobby do it your self wallet vendor like Tandy would know all about the electronics business of Radio Shack....

[trubolotta]

Most of our use of tapes was for short programs and usually discarded in a short time, so no stretching problem. For the life of me though, I can’t recall how we edited errors on the tape.

[trubolotta]

A three-toed sloth did it!

[donmeaker]

We would type a text message and use the tape to record it.

Then we could run it through the Radio teletype. That cut down our broadcast time, reducing our vulnerability, and reducing the probability that the RT would get out of adjustment during the message.

[cynwoody]

For the life of me though, I can’t recall how we edited errors on the tape.

Read faulty tape to the spots that needed correction. Type in the changes. Write corrected program to fresh tape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)

How to change "Hello" to "Goodbye", from the above:

*EBhello.c$$                     Open file for read/write with backup
*P$$                             Read in the first page
*SHello$0TT$$                    Search for "Hello" and print the line
    printf("Hello world!\n");    The line
*-5DIGoodbye$0TT$$               Delete "Hello", insert "Goodbye", and print the line
    printf("Goodbye world!\n");  The updated line
*EX$$                            Copy the remainder of the file and exit

Then there were punched cards. There would be one card per line with punches to encode the characters and the characters dot-matrix printed across the top. To edit, you

• Looked throught the deck to find the card you wanted to change
• Put it in the read side of the key punch
• Used the Dup key to copy it onto a fresh card up to the point you wanted to change
• Keyed the change onto the new card
• Duped the rest of the old card onto the new card
• Put the edited card in the deck in place of the old card

At some point in the seventies, they introduced a new, improved key punch machine which had a buffer that could hold a one card in memory. It didn't have a display, however, just a two-digit position readout. However, if you realized you made a typo, you could back up and re-key. It didn't physically punch the card until you were done and hit the Release key.

[Red Steel]

Ctrl-Shift-ESC brings up the Task Manager, at least in XP, which is the latest I’ve got.

Yup, and under DOS and earlier versions of Windows it would cause reboot.

[sarasmom]

LOL!
Before PCs were invented, I worked with cutting edge programmers to finesse what I needed to tease out of the 1s and 0s.
Three floors of machines to support about thirty user terminals....

There is still only essentially 1s and 0s in computer code.
But now they are all overlaid with multiple layers of shortcut codes.(I think people call them apps nowadays)

It took me forever to adapt/trust Windows, much less Apple/Macs, since I couldn't really understand their secretive shortcuts and codes.

I use Ctrl-Alt-Delete often! It's my favorite app. I wonder what people are going to do when a massive EMP event occurs.

[Woodman]

It still works that way today if you [CTRL]+[ALT]+[DEL] during the boot before windows loads, or from the command prompt in safe mode.

[Revolting cat!]

I used to know and love the difference between Ctrl^C, Ctrl^Y and Ctrl^Z, but then MSDOS and Windblows arrived!

[trubolotta]

Thanks. That looks right (shaking cobwebs from cerebrum). Punch cards were never a problem. Those I remember how to do.

[Revolting cat!]

My Windows laptop hangs sometimes, I think the Adobe something or other causes it (there is no log evidence in this highly advanced operating system.) And when it hangs, CtrlAltDel does not work, as it should in an operating system. That is your mistake Senor Gates. I don’t remember my Sun Solaris workstation ever hanging like that, though, truth be told, it might have done it once or twice in a dozen years.

[Woodman]

Current Windows (since XP) is not DOS, it is NT based. It does have a command line interface which looks a lot like DOS, but it isn’t.

[trubolotta]

I have always suspected that some of the errors or inconsistencies in the original DOS were carried forward because no one would dare tell Gates he did something stupid and take it on themselves to rewrite the code. Just a theory heheh.

[Ouderkirk]

In all versions of DOS Ctrl+Alt+delete forces a reboot.

This included the early versions of Win 3.1.