A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a news item about the retirement of David Bradley,
the “inventor” of Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Mr. Bradley, who is 55, recently
retired from IBM Corp., bringing to end a 28-year career with the company.
On the off chance that you’ve had the good fortune never to need to know
about Ctrl-Alt-Delete, it is the combination of keys used—often as a last
resort—to restart a stalled PC. Initially designed for use by IBM developers,
the key combination was later adopted by Microsoft for use in the Windows operating
system. “I might have invented control-alt-delete but, as I like to say,
Bill Gates made it famous,” Mr. Bradley said recently. (The Microsoft founder
was apparently not amused by the comment.)
What’s ironic about Mr. Bradley’s creation is that—while it is
one of the world’s most well-known and often-used keystrokes—it was
invented in the span of about five minutes. Mr. Bradley himself acknowledges that
he put very little thought into the creation, other than to select a combination
of keys that would be nearly impossible to select accidentally (at the time, most
keyboards only featured one Ctrl key and one Alt key, and they resided on the
left side of the keyboard, far away from the Delete key). A few minutes of code
writing and, Bam! instant progress.
And though the Ctrl-Alt-Delete command represents but a sliver of Bradley’s
overall contribution to the computing world—in addition to writing all of
the basic input and output commands for IBM’s first PC, he has written two
books and teaches at North Carolina State University—it is the five minutes
that he spent writing the command that has defined who he is, in the eyes of many.
For me, David Bradley’s story is a testament to the somewhat erratic nature
of progress. The vast majority of progress is understated, time-consuming and
evolving in nature. Take the plating industry, for example. There’s no doubt
that we’ve seen remarkable progress in plating over the course of the last
fifty years, but one would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a single development that
changed the industry overnight.
Even events that the media portrays as benchmarks in progress—such as the
landing of the rovers on Mars—are usually regarded not so much as overnight
achievements, but more as the payoff to decades of man hours and thousands of
equally important—though less publicized—developments.
But then, just when you think you’ve defined the nature of progress, somebody
spends five minutes coming up with something like Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and Bam! the
way we go about living our lives or doing business is altered, almost instantly.
Is all of this to say that Mr. Bradley’s invention is somehow more profound
or more important than the developments in plating or space exploration? Certainly
not. It is easy to get wrapped up in the genius (or sometimes luck) behind instant
progress, but we should not forget that progress that comes as a result of blood,
sweat and tears is often far more rewarding.
