The History of CTRL + ALT + DELETE

The famous key combination, Ctrl+Alt+Del is a way for Windows PC users to terminate an unresponsive task, or reboot the system.

The story goes that an engineer at IBM in the year 1980, an era when PCs weren’t sold to the public yet, was designing a program, and had to think of a quick way to terminate an application.
He chose the three keys, Ctrl+Alt+Del, as they couldn’t be accidentally pressed due to their placement on the keyboard.

A few years later when Desktop PCs became a rage among millions of users, and the Windows Operating system started gaining popularity, the software started crashing due to various reasons.

This led to the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+Del to terminate the application and restart the system to gain prominence through word of mouth, later making the engineer famous.