Bill Gates: Ctrl-Alt-Delete was a ‘Mistake’.

It’s something a lot of us do at least once every day before we start work or surf the web at home: We press the keyboard combination control, alt, delete to log on to our Windows PCs.


Now, in a candid interview over the weekend at a Harvard University interview, Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, admits this was a “mistake.”

When asked by David Rubenstein, co-chair of the Harvard campaign, why someone needs three fingers to turn on the software and computer, Gates replied “We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button … It was a mistake.”

The audience applauded and laughed at the surprising answer from one of the world’s richest men.

Gates went on to say the company did “some clever stuff.”

“We were able to experiment with a lot of stuff, but more on the software side than the hardware,” he said.