You know, I’ve had a Lenovo keyboard for a year and this is the first time I’ve noticed that. Except that mine has the A inside a stylised arrow pointing upwards. Num lock has the same symbol, but with a 1. I wonder if those keys could be used to control some kind of 1920s-style “death ray”?
On my keyboard the Euro is on 4. I press alt-gr+4, I get €, one of the most handy uses of the alt-g key.
Remember the “bell” key on the Apple II? I forget whether it was ctrl-B or some other combination. I still don’t know what that was for.
On the original teletype keyboard, the BEL was Control-G. It was used for signalling the other terminal operator to wake them up – Here’s a message 4 U!
They should have add a clackety-clack key for the non-teletypes. Printing a line of shifted characters made a lot more noise than the bell did.
Also, some dumb terminals changed the bell tone based on the horizonatal cursor position (don’t know why). If you could output fast enough you could play music that way, and get your manager to come over ask what the hell you were doing. Ah! Good times!
not quite that loud.
it was used to alert to the start of a message. since messages could take a while to be completed and you would have noise from multiple teletypes going at the same time, it would alert you to the start of a message so you could read the header to judge its importance.
Do you have an Alt Gr key to the right of the spacebar? If so, that’ll work, otherwise amanset is correct.
In some military teletype networks (like the ones I used to work with), the header of a high-priority message would start with multiple BEL characters, so you could hear the importance of the message without screwing around with reading and judgment and other stuff you wouldn’t trust a 19-year-old recruit with.
“When a message comes in with 4 ‘ding’ sounds, drop whatever you’re doing, watch the message come in, tear it off when it completes, log it, put it with the appropriate classification cover sheet, and hand-carry it to the command section pronto. Got it, Airman?”
I have used a keyboard for freaking decades and never thought to look at the symbols. Until today, I didn’t realize that caps lock, scroll lock and number lock had symbols.
Why do they have words if they have symbols? 1, 2, 3 etc, don’t have ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’ written under them. Same with Tab and Enter and Shift.
And why don’t ctrl and alt have symbols?
And why does my numeric keypad have ‘enter’ but not the arrow thingee?
So many questions! You’ve opened my eyes, Straight Dope!
Just noticing that the A in a box symbol occurs on the Caps Lock key, and concluding therefrom that it is a symbol for Caps Lock does not really explain anything, or provide any real answer to the OP’s question. He already knows what key the symbol is on. The real question is, why the fuck should an A in a box represent “Caps Lock”? How would anyone know that it does so, except by noticing that it (sometimes) occurs on what they already know to be the Caps Lock key? There is nothing particularly intuitive about it. It could mean anything. Furthermore, how does having it there help anyone?
The Caps Lock key is, notoriously, among the least used on the keyboard. Why does it need a special (but inscrutable) symbol, as well as its normal label, when other, more important keys do not?
This isn’t universally true. The keyboard I’m typing on (from HP) has symbols for Tab, Shift, Enter, and Backspace, and notably not for Caps Lock.
What about Control, Alt (is that short for something?), Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down? These are all keys I, for one, certainly use more than Caps Lock*, yet I have never seen a symbol (at lest, not one representing their main function) on any of them.
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
*On my old keyboard I even deliberately disabled Caps Lock in case I hit it by mistake. I was distressed to find that that facility is not available on my new one.
The Alt key is short for alternate, and on some keyboards it does have its own symbol.
You damn kids who never used even a dumb terminal let alone a typewriter! Along with the Bell command:
[ul]
[li]CTRL + C = break (most keyboards still have a PAUSE/BREAK key but it’s rarely used. If you grew up learning to program you used it as often as ENTER!)[/li][li]CTRL + S = pause[/li][li]CTRL + Q = continue[/li][/ul]
These three CTRL key combos still work on Windows. Open a CMD window, type dir/s & hit enter and try all three.
Why does my P key spray me with urine?!
you should try it lower case. with it upper case it aims up.
So I’m using a different keyboard now. No symbol on the Caps Lock key, but the Num Lock has a line drawing of a 2 button corded mouse. Keyboard makers are weird.
Why does pressing my tab key not result in my getting a soft drink?
Or represents the gesture you performed when you did a carriage return by hand: the carriage had a large lever on the right, which protruded towards the typist. The typist would “flip” the lever to perform the return. The flip involves moving the lever/your fingertips from right to left. Now excuse me, I feel a sudden need to go check whether I’m eligible to join the local version of AARP.
You’re remembering it backwards. To do a manual carriage return, your left hand pushes the carriage to the right.
But maybe the symbol is based on the electric typewriter carriage return, in which the carriage doesn’t move, but the type head moves to the left.
Unless you’ve got a Hebrew or Arabic typewriter, of course.
It does on the on-screen display on this computer. Although it’s not just a box, but actually a lock, which unlocks for lowercase.
And, oddly enough, it’s working backwards right now.