| ▲ | tosti 3 hours ago | |
Ctrl+Alt+Del on an IBM PC or a compatible clone reboots the machine no questions asked. There's a dedicated reset button in case that fails. Doing anything other than a reboot started with protected mode MS-Windows 3.1 IIRC (then marketed as "386 enhanced mode"). | ||
| ▲ | aaronmdjones an hour ago | parent [-] | |
Yeah; in Windows 3.1, Ctrl+Alt+Del took you to a blue screen that allowed you to kill an unresponsive task (but didn't display a list of tasks; the Task List was launched with Ctrl+Esc), or told you there was no such task to kill if there wasn't. Before Windows 3.1 it just rebooted the machine as you described. Launching Task Manager was the 95 to XP behaviour, but NT behaved differently -- even Windows NT 4.0 (developed alongside Windows 95) took you to the security screen with Ctrl+Alt+Del (something that would later be ported to Vista), where launching Task Manager was one of its options. These OSes weren't used residentially though, until Windows 2000 attempted to merge their lineages and Windows XP finally cemented the deal. | ||