Forums | MacLife

To answer your question, some history and some tech:

First, realize that intel came out with the 8086/8088 before motorola brought out the Z80. So, arguably, PC's have been around a lot longer than Macs. UNICODE was kind of a theory back then, so PC's used (and still kinda do use) ASCII. Now, in ASCII code, as in just about any other code, charachters from the keyboard are given numeric values, so they can be processed mathematicly through the processor. All charachter sets do this by nature, it's just that UNICODE has more bits of information for one charachter, and therefore can handle more charachters by itself. This is why your Mac can handle Japaneese nativley and why Windows has to download a bit of an expansion if it wants to do so.

Okay, but back to num lock. Num lock adds a small number to the ASCII code in order to kind of stray away from the first charachters in the set. These are things like NULL, odd OS blank spaces, etc... but scince you and I live in an age of really sweet GUI's (yes, Windows is a sweet GUI compared to DOS), things dont  exactly work like this anymore, although the basis is pretty much the same. Nowadays, all num lock does is keep the extended keypad on keyboards active.

Caps Lock works under the same idea. It adds 20 to the numeric value of the charachter, which, by clever design of the charachter set, lands it right on the Capital Version of that letter.

Scroll Lock actually comes from the days of text command promt OS's. In DOS, if you type in dir/w to get a directory listing, in, say, a very long directory, that thing could scroll forever. Scroll Lock kept the text from scrolling by. Eventually, pause would do the exact same thing. And, if you are wondering, PrintScreen would send what was on the screen (paused with scroll lock, that is), and send it directly to 1) first, it was the monitor (for programming outputs, etc...) and 2) eventually, the printer that was hooked up.

Since all computers, no mater which charachter set , or, even, command line OS, use the same principles, all keyboards used the same buttons. This insured compatibility. We have them now to insure Backwards compatibility. Yes, you are paying good money for keys you dont use. I find it's fun to make the PrintScreen key actually say "PANIC". That's a classic. 

On a better note, I feel better now that we have OS's that let us map functions to certain keys.Also, I agree that Apple DID do it right with the LED below the Caps Lock key. It not only looks just plain cooler, but it's also easier to tell weather CL is on or off. I can tell you how many times I've typed out paragraphs looking at the text keys on PC keyboards only to find that my writing is all uppercase. Grrrr....

Oh, and I may be a LITTLE off my ass. Some of this stuff happened before/while I was born, but I'm sure someone can illuminate you on any errors i made. You get the general idea though.

Actually, if you look at a PC keyboard, especially at the numeric keypad on the right of the keyboard, you will notice the arrow keys, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, Ins and Del keys on the numeric key pad.

With Num Lock on, you get the numbers and zero and the decimal point. In Microsoft Excel entering numerical data using the numerical keypad with Num Lock off is bad. Rather than entering data, the selected cell will be dancing all over the screen, along with jumping up and down the worksheet, along with altered and lost data. 

It's amazing that with a PC you can downgrade it right to a dumb terminal.

-RC!

I agree... People get really freaked out when they are typing here in the lab and they go to correct something, but instead of inserting it overwrites! Makes me look like a hero though...
~Tim