Scroll Lock

Since the dawn of the IBM computers, the Scroll Lock key was fashioned and positioned neatly on the keyboard, and it still remains on standard 101-key and even supposedly "enhanced" keyboards. (Honestly!) Newer Macintosh keyboards sport them, even though they didn't on the early Mac boards. I'd like to know who made that decision..

The purpose of Scroll Lock was DOS-based. Before the rise of cool graphics on Fisherprice software like Windows, people had to resort to fixed-size fonts on minimal resolutions, and thus the amount of text you could see on screen was pretty limited (80x25 if you really want to know). The Scroll Lock key was therefore incorporated so that you could use the arrow keys to scroll the text in the direction you wanted (rather than controlling the cursor).

System Request

Quite an enigma this one. The SysRq, or SysReq, key was introduced as the 84th key for the 83-key IBM keyboard, and even then it hardly served a purpose to anyone using a PC. It was designed to facilitate really boring, low-level computer stuff like switching tasks during the process of multi-tasking. But as it turned out, the Windows developers never even bothered to include it as functionality. So long, SysRq, we hardly knew ye!

So, you might ask.. why is it still here? Well, that is a good question.

Pause and Break

Again, another DOS-based key. As you may have guessed, it was for pausing.. and sometimes breaking. If you've got a computer that starts up with a bunch of DOS text, or you've seen a DOS program try to display a whole ton of text on screen, you'll notice that it scrolls pretty fast. The pause key was designed for people who didn't have the fast eye coordination speed of a grasshopper on drugs, that they could pause the text and take things slowly without getting a seizure.

The break functionality is what happens when you press the key while holding down the control key. Apparently too much control will break some people, and this ideal was carried over to the world of DOS. The idea was that if your program, particularly a BAT file (which contains a list of DOS commands and programs to run) was misbehaving or you wanted to kill it, pressing Ctrl+Break would allow you to bravely run away from program execution. Many a day has seen the message..

C^
Terminate batch job? (Y/N) C^
Terminate batch job? (Y/N) C^
Terminate batch job? (Y/N) C^
Terminate batch job? (Y/N) C^
Terminate batch job? (Y/N) oh.. er.... Y
C:\WINDOZE>