David J. Bradley (born 4 January 1949) is one of the twelve engineers who worked on the original IBM PC, developing the computer's ROM BIOS code.
Bradley joined IBM in 1975 after earning his doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University with a dissertation on computer architectures.
According to Bradley, Control-Alt-Delete was not intended to be used by end users, originally—it was meant to be used by people writing programs or documentation, so that they could reboot their computers without powering them down.
Since software developers and technical writers would need to restart a computer many times, this key combination was a big time-saver.
At the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC on August 8, 2001 at The Tech Museum, while on a panel with Bill Gates, Bradley said, "I have to share the credit.
[6] Bradley is the author of Assembly Language Programming for the IBM Personal Computer (Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-13-049171-3, January 1984), also released in French as Assembleur sur IBM PC (Dunod, ISBN 2-225-80695-0), Russian ("Radio" Publishing House, Moscow), and Bulgarian ("Technica" Publishing house, 1989).
Upon graduation he went to work for IBM in Boca Raton, Florida, as senior associate engineer.
Bradley wrote about the development of the IBM PC, including Control-Alt-Delete, in the August 2011 issue of the IEEE's Computer magazine.