Windows solved this problem in the 90s by capturing a magic keystroke that only it had access to and requesting that the user enter the keystroke before logging

Windows solved this problem in the 90s by capturing a magic keystroke that only it had access to and requesting that the user enter the keystroke before logging in. The developers at Microsoft searched for a keystroke that absolutely no application would be interested in using itself, and then they stumbled across the perfect one: Ctrl+Alt+Del (soft reboot sequence in DOS). That's why you had to press Ctrl+Alt+Del in order to log in to Windows NT based operating systems for a long time.