Bill Gates Has Only One Regret: Ctrl-Alt-Delete Should Have Been A Single Button

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has one lingering regret: the ctrl-alt-delete function on Windows should have been easier to use, the renown tech-billionaire opined during a recent forum. The philanthropist was responding to David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, who questioned the peculiar key combination, as it’s infamous for requiring two hands to input.

“If I can make one small edit, I’d make that a single-key operation,” Gates said during the forum, according to CNN.

With a wide smile, Gates genially instigated the engineering team at IBM for the odd keys used, noting that computing tech at the time made such a function tricky to seamlessly integrate into Windows’ platform.

“The IBM PC hardware keyboard only had one way that it could get a guaranteed interrupt generated. So, clearly the people involved, they should have put another key on it to make that work,” Gates remarked at the forum.

It’s not the first time Gates half-jokingly pinned the blame on IBM, either.

“…the guys who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button,” Gates had previously said at a 2013 appearance.

The incident doesn’t appear to be weighing too heavily on his conscience, however.

“I’m not sure you can go back and change small things in your life without putting the other things at risk,” Gates noted.

While Gates enjoys virtually universal recognition across the world for his groundbreaking work that made home computers accessible to the masses, his attention in recent years has been focused on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charity started by and named after he and his wife.

The couple’s fight against global poverty necessitates that they go up against some political heavyweights; Bill and Melinda have both spent significant time in Washington, D.C., in recent years to lobby for increased foreign aid.

“We are a global community, and we need to talk about being a global community,” Melinda recently told CNN.

The couple also partnered with other billionaires, chief among them the famed Warren Buffet, in pledging over half of their fortunes to various charities upon their deaths. More than 168 billionaires have joined Bill and Melinda in their quest, according to USAToday.

[Featured image by Yana Paskova/Getty Images]