CTRL + ALT + DEL

CTRL + ALT + DEL - The story behind the shortcut

Have you ever thought about who invented the "CTRL+ALT+DEL" key combination? The name of the man behind this world famous command is Dave Bradley. It is also called the Three Finger Salute or the Vulcan Nerve Pinch.
Bradley spent 1 minute and 23 seconds in writing the source code that has rescued the world's
PC users for decades and will continue to do so. This extraordinary IBM employee is retired after a prolonged service of 29 years. His formula forces obstinate computers to restart
when they no longer follow other commands.

By 1980, he was one of 12 people working to create the debug. The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to restart the computer when it fails to respond to the user. Bradley wrote the code to make it work. Earlier, he deisigned it in such a way that CTRL+ALT+ESC would restart the PC, but an accidental bump on the left side could also do the same. He then changed it to CTRL+ALT+DEL
He famously said "I did a lot of other things than Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but I'm famous for that one."
He commented his relationship with Bill gates by saying "I may have invented it, but Bill gates made it famous by applying my formula when ever any Microsoft's Windows operating system made by him CRASHES, thus I win when ever he loses".

image courtesy: CNN