Bill Gates confesses: 'Control-Alt-Delete' was a mistake Bill Gates sits on stage. He has confessed that the 'Control-Alt-Delete' command to log into Windows was a mistake. BILL Gates has confessed that it was a mistake to set 'Control-Alt-Delete' as a way to log in to Windows. During a talk at Harvard, Gates said that there was an option to make a single button for such a command, but the IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button. "You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software - actually hard-coded in the hardware - that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it's able to do that," mr Gates said. It was a mistake. David Bradley, a designer of the original IBM PC, invented 'Control-Alt-Delete' "I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Mr Bradley said. The command also effectively restarts the computer but Mr Bradley said "Why they used it for the log-in also, I don't know."