Interesting factoid: David Bradley implemented the CTRL-ALT-DEL “three-finger salute” to aid in debugging the original IBM PC way back in 1980 so that he and the development team could soft-reset the machine without needing to endure the slow POST procedure every time.
Apparenly he first considered CTRL-ALT-ESC but rejected the idea because it would be too easy to accidentally press all three of those keys if somebody/something mashed the left-hand side of the keyboard, so he replaced ESC with somethin on the far right (DEL). His criteria were keys that that wouldn’t cause a character to print on the screen.
Seems like the implementer of Task Manager picked up wjere he left off and chose CTRL-ALT-ESC anyway. Whether it’s some kind of homage, a coincidence, similar thinking constrained by the three finger salute having already been taken, or something else, is anybody’s guess. I’d really like to know how he came up with that key combination (and whether he considered that it could be accidentally triggered more easily than CTRL-ALT-DEL though by this time BIOS calls could be intercepted thanks to 386 Enhanced Mode and therefore you wouldn’t simply instantly reboot your machine).
Apparenly he first considered CTRL-ALT-ESC but rejected the idea because it would be too easy to accidentally press all three of those keys if somebody/something mashed the left-hand side of the keyboard, so he replaced ESC with somethin on the far right (DEL). His criteria were keys that that wouldn’t cause a character to print on the screen.
Seems like the implementer of Task Manager picked up wjere he left off and chose CTRL-ALT-ESC anyway. Whether it’s some kind of homage, a coincidence, similar thinking constrained by the three finger salute having already been taken, or something else, is anybody’s guess. I’d really like to know how he came up with that key combination (and whether he considered that it could be accidentally triggered more easily than CTRL-ALT-DEL though by this time BIOS calls could be intercepted thanks to 386 Enhanced Mode and therefore you wouldn’t simply instantly reboot your machine).