Discussion on:

The Escape button: a key to the psychology of device design?

A hardware-based interruption should be available on all computers. It should be connected to a monitor (an old term for the program that oversees and controls all the other programs, even the main o/s) that brings everything else to a halt, and then the user can pick and choose what to switch to, ot allow to run. There are entirely too many things going on in computers that are unneccessary. Things that don't benefit the user but benefit other entities. Computers would be more useful and more secure if we had to do a few of the operations manually.