Under the Fuzzy Green Hat

From user “Kwakmeister” of the World of Warcraft Forums:

Ok im new to hotkeying so im most likely doing something wrong. I can hotkey alt to anything but the function keys. I can do alt+f1, f2, f3 but when i get to f4 it crashes my game EVERY TIME! Its annoying because I have to reset all my hotkeys cuz a game crash doesnt save them. Please fix soon!

Since my audience tends to skew nerd-supernerd, let’s have a quick laugh before I start pontificating. “Ha! What an idiot! He didn’t even know that ALT+F4 quits a program in Windows! No wonder he couldn’t bind that hotkey! Strike down with the cluehammer, and roll out the ASCII Picard Facepalm! L.O.L!”

Okay. Now that our schadenfreude’s been satisfied, let’s get serious. Under what insane mnemonic shortcut system does ALT+F4 mean “quit program”? I’m guessing it’s some holdover from the DOS era, or from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, but why some programmer analyst would pick it over Control+Q is baffling.

So, I open it up to you: instead of trying to scientifically Google something, why not just make stuff up? What’s your ALT+F4 origin story?