I don't know if it's related to Mr. Bradley's retirement, but lately CtrlAltDel isn't getting through my old Dell computer's thick skull. It must be physically turned off and back on again and when I do that, I get scolded and my C: drive gets scanned for errors.

It's depressing because I am never told if there are any errors or what they may be, so I can't avoid making the same error in the future. It never occurred to me that it just might be a diabolical plot devised by Mr. Bradley to make his beloved brainchild CtrlAltDel malfunction in selected machines as his own private little joke while he goes off to enjoy his golden retirement years chuckling at his cleverness.

And in other news, General Failure is still reading our hard drives.

Nah, Bradley said that while he invented the keystroke, it's Bill Gate (who's sitting beside him) that made it famous.

what about the fist-into-monitor bail-out?

Ctrl-Alt-Del is trapped by the BIOS keyboard code and results in a low level interrupt to the running OS. If the system is hosed badly enough that the BIOS code isn't running, then nothing will happen. The real annoyance for me is the disappearance of the reset key and a hard-wired power switch on modern boxes. Instead, the power switch is "soft" i.e. is sends a signal to the motherboard that then (under software control) tells the power supply to switch off most of the power. This allows software-driven suspend and power-down modes, plus wake-on-lan and other nifty features. The downside, of course, is that if the OS gets hosed, none of this works and you can neither turn it off from the front, nor get it to reset. (This is when I reach for the switch on the power strip.)

All of this is driven by Microsoft Wintel design principles, which basically presume that their software will never crash (yeah, right) and in general assume that all users are idiots and can't be trusted to not hit the power/reset keys when it's not a good idea. (The problem I have with that is the word "all". And people do learn, after a while.)

Steven, you should have posted the funniest portion of the story:

At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft founder Bill Gates (news - web sites) and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys.

"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Bradley said.

Gates didn't laugh.

Eric, holding the power button in for several seconds should cut power, saving you the bonked head and general annoyance of a dive for the power strip.

A true pioneer in computer science.

So who wrote the Ctrl-Open Apple-Reset code?