This week, The Straight Dope tackles an important, deeply puzzling question: what are all these useless keys and labels on my keyboard?
In some cases oddball keys were put on the PC keyboard (or to be more precise, included in the ASCII character set, most of which found its way onto the PC keyboard) because the developers figured they'd come in handy for something, and on the whole they have--programmers and developers have been able find a use for nearly every key on the keyboard, even if that use isn't obvious to the general computing public.Learn the secrets of Scroll Lock, Pause, and the all-important SysRq by clicking More >
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Julian Robichaux http://www.nsftools.com | 10/5/2003 2:25:25 PM
All I know is, my scroll lock key gets randomly activated every once in a while, and it's very annoying when I'm trying to fill out a long form in Notes. What happens is I'll be in a field, and when I try to arrow down to the next field, the whole form starts scrolling down but the cursor stays put. The first time that ever happened to me I thought my computer was possessed.
The sclk key on your keyboard is the computer equivilant of the appendix or the pinky-toe in humans. Its proof that PC's evolved from lower-tech life forms. Sure, we find uses for it, but really -- you can remove it and not really be the worse for wear. You'll still be able to do all the things you can do now, but you'll have a small scar where it was.
--AP