PC Keyboard: The First Five Years

Well, okay. 12 f keys and color Windows.

(I put "properly" in quotes because many---even most---type in a different way quite successfully. But for me, it really helped reduce the number of mistakes I made. With caps lock, I don't have to mess that up when I write LONG_UPPERCASE_CONSTANTS.)

It's been in that position, above the left shift, in every keyboard I've ever used. And that includes typewriters, where the Caps Lock mechanically locked the shift key below it (which is mechanically linked to the shift key on the other side) on the down position; a quick press on the shift key released the lock. That is, it's a fact of life, like Ç being to the right of L; that key being anywhere else would be unusual.

> Indeed, does anyone ever actually use CAPSLOCK?

When typing a long sequence of uppercase characters, it's much more comfortable than holding down the shift key for the whole sequence. It affecting only letters, instead of everything like on a typewriter, doesn't matter much since it's normally used for a sequence of letters.

YES I DO, PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE ME :)

Jokes aside - it's still useful when you're writing legal or other documents where certain phrases or sentences must be emphasised by placing them in all caps. A hold-out from the typewriter era when bold and italics were generally not available.

I also use it occasionally for writing assembly language, where it's conventional to write the opcode mnemonics in upper case. It also helps when doing reports on the kind of spreadsheet that uses upper case keywords as a kind of primary key, because you need to interact with people who think a relational database is something to do with geneaology.

We've started folks into the habit of using double-tap on Shift as CAPSLOCK on mobile and soft keyboards, and there's no real reason we couldn't bring that same innovation to hardware keyboards. It's still a surprise that it doesn't seem an option in macOS and Windows. Free up that key left of A for backspace, control, or escape for everybody.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code

"×" is the same as "x". "÷" can be made by overstriking ":" and "-". The quotation marks needed to also function as accents, by overstriking: "ë é è".

CR and LF are separate operations on a typewriter. You might want to simulate bold type by sending CR and retyping part (or all) of a line.

[ and ] were added for the benefit of Algol, and other programming languages with an Algol-derived syntax. Though it was recognized that these characters were less essential, and these code points were left undefined in ISO 646, the international version of ASCII. This is also why the brackets were put in the alphabet part of the ASCII table, in other countries these code points would've been used for letters that weren't part of the English alphabet.

It was anticipated that some manufacturers would use a 6-bit subset of ASCII. (Even 5-bit and 4-bit subsets were considered.) This would mean that the lower case block would be collapsed on the upper case block. So they needed to find characters that could be useful but would still make sense when rendered as [ and ]. Hence { and }.

Hope this helps. A lot of thought went into ASCII, but many of the considerations became obsolete during the 70s. And you could say that any terminal that does not support overstriking, does not properly support ASCII :)

I had a PC keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle 2) for a while which had this setup with copy/paste as separate keys. Unfortunately for me, these keys were macro keys which sent "CTRL plus the key at position three on line two" etc, and since I use dvorak layout, the C,X and V keys are mapped to Ä,Q and J, which meant "cut" became "quit" (CTRL-Q).

I don't know how Sun handled this, if the edit-keys sent some specific keycode that the program interpreted like "cut" and not just "CTRL-X"?

When it comes to ease of use this is a completely different story though...