And (it may not be well known) that the famous "three figured salute" was a quick and dirty kludge coded by an IBM programmer called David Bradley to cause a gentle re-boot during development of a well-known operating system. If my memory serves me well he was coding the keyboard mapping routines at the time, and (as often is the case during development) his machine kept locking up. So, to avoid having to keep groping about with the physical switches, he patched the Ctrl+Alt+Del hot-keys to cause the well-known "soft reboot". Like a lot of good temporary solutions that worked (can anyone list a few others?), this "feature" became permanent!
These days, of course, this "short cut" calls the Windows Task Manager.
For more, see
Ctrl+Alt+Del.
