Scroll lock...

Have you ever used this innocuous key named "Scroll lock" in your keyboard? In my 8+ years of using the beast, this is one key in the keyboard that I never knew the use for. At times I used to get curious and press this key to see if it really means what it reads. When scrolling through a web page, I press this key and then try to scroll, and it will scroll just fine. Then I would give up and forget about it. Today, I set out to find what this key really means and I did find out that scroll lock key is intended to temporarily stop the scrolling of text or halt the operation of a program. Today many programs commonly do not utilize or function properly with this key. However, an example of a program that this key may still commonly be used in is Microsoft Excel. I can press the scroll lock key to move the window without moving the selected cell or visa versa. I also found out that this key is used in Unix and Linux flavors to freeze the terminal screen during an output. Some KVM switches also use scroll lock to select the CPUs(Looks like they preferred this key since they realized no one uses this key and its just lying around for nothing). I was even surprised to find out that there are some keyboards around without this key.

So now I am peace with this key now. Many a times I used to wonder why they would waste a key in this tightly packed keyboard which no one really uses..