Was ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’ command a mistake?

Bill Gates has recently come out to apologise about the infamous ‘three-finger salute’ as it is known to some or the ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’ command that most are familiar with and was used when the “blue screen of death” would appear in the older versions of the Windows Operating System.

Although the keyboard short-cut was the brain child of an IBM engineer David Bradley it was Bill Gates and Microsoft that made it famous. In a recent interview Bill gates argued that “We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button.”

This is not the only confession to have come out from the computer giants. Tim Berners-Lee who is credited to have created the World Wide Web confessed in an interview in 2009 that “it seemed like a good idea at the time” when referring to the forward slashes (//) that appear before a Web Address. He admitted that it was “unnecessary” and did not know it would cause “so much hassle”. The good thing is that most if not all Web Browsers have now added the ‘http://’ tags pre-programmed saving millions, time and syntax error messages.

I am sure there will be more confessions coming out later. I wonder what life would have been like without the ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’ and the two ‘forward slashes (//)’. I do wonder but most probably it would have been the same.