This annoying string of key commands, which continues to plague desktop devices today, was actually an error. In 2013, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates finally came clean in an interview at the Harvard Campaign launch that he meant for computers to start using one button, not three.
"It was a mistake," Mr. Gates told a laughing audience. "We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't wanna give us our single button."
David Bradley, the IBM engineer who worked on the original PC, had previously admitted to creating the combination to reboot a computer but said in an interview that “Bill made it famous."
