Modern keyboards delight computer lovers with a stunning variety of shapes, colors and services. It is enough to press one of the buttons - and your favorite site will open, the player or mail client will start. There are so many buttons that not all of them are known to the average user. And even experienced people sometimes get lost when meticulous beginners ask about the purpose of such a strange button as Scroll Lock.
The computer keyboard as a tool for transferring and transforming information was born much earlier than the computer itself. True, it was called then somewhat differently and was an important part of the telegraph apparatus. The keyboard was located directly on the telegraph case, which was not very convenient. The inventor Roel House came up with the idea of separating the typesetting board from the machine itself, creating for the first time something that resembled the modern configuration of a data entry device.
Another device with a keyboard in 1880 was demonstrated to everyone by William Burroughs. It was an adding machine with keys with which it was possible to print the results of mathematical research. The computer keyboard itself was invented only in the 60s of the last century by Douglas Engelbart. The operating principles of the keyboard, as well as the structure of data transmission, have remained unchanged since then, and continue to be used to this day.
According to experts, for the first time the Scroll Lock button appeared on the layout of a data entry device from IBM. It was intended to change the viewing mode of electronic documents. When pressing the Scroll Lock, you could use the arrow keys to scroll through the pages. If the Scroll Lock button did not work, then the cursor only allowed to move through the pages of the document, turning them entirely.
Nowadays, developers are struggling to give Scroll Lock a new meaning, since it is clear that modern programs for editing and viewing text may well do without this key. The creators of the Opera browser, for example, "hung" on the Scroll Lock to activate the operation of voice commands. Having downloaded a small library with the necessary files, and having enabled Scroll Lock, you can use the voice accompaniment package directly from the program and thus begin, finally, to fully communicate with your own computer.
Dell has also found a way to take over Scroll Lock. The developers of the service utility software decided that this button would work fine instead of the rather boring Fn key. Therefore, on many laptop models of this company, the user is asked to turn off the screen, decrease or increase the sound, first press the Scroll Lock, and then on one of the function keys.
The most traditional application is Scroll Lock in Microsoft's Excel application. In this program, the button is used to change the value of an action with the cursor key. If you create a selection of several cells in an Excel document, then with the Scroll Lock disabled, pressing any cursor key will deselect the selection. However, when the button is enabled, the same pressing will move the document page to the indicated direction, while leaving the previously made selection active.
