Steve Ballmer Wrote C/A/D Text

Here’s an interesting tidbit of information I learned today. Steve Ballmer wrote the text for the CTRL-ALT-DEL, seen by millions of people around the world, many times over the years. Interesting stuff from the older days of Microsoft and Windows 3.1.

During this time period, Steve Ballmer was head of the Systems Division, and he paid a visit to the Windows team to see what they were up to, as is the wont of many executives.¹ When they showed him the Ctrl+Alt+Del feature, he nodded thoughtfully and added, “This is nice, but I don’t like the text of the message. It doesn’t sound right to me.”