[6][7] Bradley, as the chief engineer of the IBM PC project and developer of the machine's ROM-BIOS, had originally used Ctrl+Alt+Esc,[8] but found it was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer accidentally.
[12] The feature, however, was detailed in IBM's technical reference documentation[3] to the original PC and thereby revealed to the general public.
"[7] In a March 2018 email, one of Bradley's co-workers confirmed the command was invented in 1981 in Boca Raton, Florida.
[13] Bradley is also known for his good-natured jab at Gates at the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC on August 8, 2001 at The Tech Museum: "I have to share the credit.
"; he quickly added it was a reference to Windows NT logon procedures ("Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on").
[14][10] During a question and answer presentation on 21 September 2013, Gates said "it was a mistake", referring to the decision to use Ctrl+Alt+Del as the keyboard combination to log into Windows.
In both cases, the system flushes the page cache, cleanly unmounts all disc volumes, but does not cleanly shut down any running programs (and thus does not save any unsaved documents, or the current arrangements of the objects on the Workplace Shell desktop or in any of its open folders).
For example, in the Billy Talent song "Perfect World", part of the lyrics include the sequence and associate it with resetting their memory and escaping from a situation: "Control-Alt-Deleted.