It was meant to be a secret, shared only among IBM programmers developing the first personal computers. They had to reboot the entire system every time they ran into a glitch... and that happened a LOT in the beginning.
It was costing so much wasted time that David Bradley developed a little shortcut that would reset the computer avoiding a lot of stuff we don't want to know about. He set it up that if CTRL ALT DEL were hit at the same time... you could avoid the Microsoft "Blue Screen of Death." Remember that?
So useful was this secret it was passed mouth to mouth, friend to friend. I just used it about 20 minutes ago. Thank you, David!
And now to some not-so-secret bidding. Let's see if we can reboot our responses over a minor opener.