Bradley, who came up with the original idea of "Control-Alt-Delete" as an employee of IBM in the early 1980s, did not intend this key combination to be used by end users; it was intended to be used by people who were writing programs or writing documentation so that they could reboot their computers without powering them down. This was useful since after a computer was powered down, it was necessary to wait a few seconds before powering it up again if one wanted to avoid damaging the hardware. Since software developers and technical writers needed to restart a computer many times in order to do their jobs effectively, this key combination was a big time saver. He used these keys in particular because it is virtually impossible to press these keys on a standard keyboard by accident.
This key combination still exists in the Windows operating system to either give a list of running programs (in the case of Windows 95, Windows 98), or to give a list of administative functions, such as to reboot the computer, give a task list, or password protect the computer (in the case of Windows 2000 and Windows XP).
Bradley is also wrote Assembly Language Programming for the IBM Personal Computer, which was published on January, 1984. As of September, 2003, he still worked for IBM, and has been quoted to saying that his invention is "as close as you get to a rock star within IBM."
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