When I first learned about it on a old DOS machine. My reaction: gee this is weird and not so obvious. But then I was told this is weird because it is not to be triggered by mistake to reboot. Back then, some machines typically has the reset switch in the BACK of the machine for the same reason.
But I think a single button to reboot would even a bigger mistake. Triggering that by accident is no fun.
Waita minute, why do machines need to be rebooted? Yes, some programs crashes. Some don't even crash consistently. But I can't accept default out-of-box programs from Microsoft to crash inconsistently and sometimes quietly I don't even get an error message or even BSOD.
Yes it is poor programming.... or just programming is too easy to screw up. Got a while loop but forgot to increment that counter? .. on some environment that don't let you kill the job? (like DOS). Need to reboot. Well loops are easy to track, but often time it is tricky pointers to caused blue screen of death or other things... Modern OS now have Task Manager that lets you kill particular malfunctioning jobs. This is good. But Microsoft things sometimes still require you to reboot machine...
Besides the power switch (which you risk losing unsaved work), there is another way to reboot... the "shutdown" DOS command. But the DOS prompt may not be available. So the 3-finger-salute is the way to go... hope you don't have to salute often. Get a Mac you say? Yes the Mac crashes less, but not entirely crash proof.
Ok, besides rebooting, there is one more use: to get to the Login screen. You have seen "Press Control-Alt-Delete to login". Now this definitely is going to be difficult with one hand (let's say you're eating ice-cream cone in another hand). I've heard the reason is that no other programs can use this key combination... making it difficult to someone to steal your password with a fake login screen.
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