Why Your Keyboard Has Keys Nobody Uses (A Short History)

Look down at your keyboard and count the keys you have never deliberately pressed. Scroll Lock. Pause. SysRq. Probably Insert. Possibly Num Lock, unless you have hit it by accident and wondered why the numbers stopped working.

Every one of them solved a real problem. The problems are gone and the keys are not, which makes a modern keyboard a peculiar object: a working tool that is also an archaeological site, with layers from the 1870s, the 1960s, the 1980s and the 1990s all still physically present under your hands.

This article goes through what each of them was actually for, why they survived, and the one that is genuinely remarkable — a key that was manufactured onto hundreds of millions of keyboards for a function that was never defined in the first place.

SysRq: the key that never had a job

Start with the strangest one, because nothing else on the keyboard has quite this history.

IBM introduced System Request with the PC/AT. The intention was reasonable: a dedicated key that could invoke low-level operating system functions with no possibility of conflicting with anything an application had already claimed. A clean channel to the machine itself, reserved in advance.

The function it was reserved for never materialized. As the reference on System Request records, the key was created for a future purpose that did not arrive, and it sat on keyboards for decades doing nothing at all — not deprecated, not repurposed, simply never assigned.

There is a coda, and it is a reminder that developers relate to the keyboard differently from everyone else — the symbol load that code puts on those keys is roughly eight times the prose figure. Linux later implemented the magic SysRq key, a set of low-level kernel commands that can sync disks, terminate processes or reboot a machine that has otherwise stopped responding. That is a genuinely valuable function, and it exists because developers found a use for a key that was already there rather than because anyone designed the key for it. The sequence is worth noticing: the hardware came first, sat unused for years, and the software arrived afterwards to fill it — which is the opposite of how anyone would plan it.

Scroll Lock and the age of scrolling text

Scroll Lock is the key most people cannot even guess about, and its purpose only makes sense if you remember what screens used to do. It is worth contrasting with the one keyboard capability that genuinely earns its place for both gamers and fast typists — n-key rollover — which is invisible until the moment it fails.

Before graphical interfaces and mice, text scrolled past you and there was no obvious way to go back and look at it. Scroll Lock addressed that by changing what the arrow keys did: with it enabled, the arrows scrolled the contents of the window instead of moving the cursor within the text. It also allowed you to pause output that was rushing past, so a long boot sequence or a wall of log messages could actually be read. The reference on Scroll Lock sets out both behaviors.

Both problems were solved decisively by other means. Scroll bars, mouse wheels and pageable output made the key redundant, and software stopped implementing it. What remains is a small number of applications — spreadsheets most notably — where it still does what it always did.

Which produces the key's main modern function, which is confusing people. Someone presses it accidentally, their spreadsheet arrow keys start scrolling the whole sheet instead of moving between cells, and the application appears to have broken. It is doing precisely what it was designed to do, forty years late and to an audience that has no idea the feature exists.

Pause and Break: stopping a computer

The Pause/Break key carries two names because it inherited two separate functions, and it is worth knowing that originally it was not a key at all.

On the original IBM PC keyboard neither function had a dedicated key. Pause was produced by Control plus Num Lock, and Break by Control plus Scroll Lock — two of the other keys in this article, doing double duty. The combined Pause/Break key came later, which is why it bears a compound label that describes two unrelated jobs.

Pause halted scrolling output so it could be read. Break sent an interrupt — a signal that could stop a running program, which mattered enormously when a misbehaving program could otherwise run indefinitely with no other way to intervene. Both were essential in a command-line world and both were superseded by better mechanisms.

Read down the third column and a pattern appears. Almost every one of these keys was made obsolete by the mouse and the graphical interface rather than by a better key. They are collectively a monument to the era when the keyboard was the only input device a computer had.

Caps Lock is a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem

Caps Lock is the most disliked key on the board, and its history explains both why it exists and why the justification evaporated.

It descends from the shift lock on mechanical typewriters, and the mechanism matters. Each typebar carried two characters, and the shift key physically moved the entire type apparatus so the upper character struck the page. That took real force, and it was assigned to the little finger. Holding it down while typing a run of capitals was genuinely tiring, so shift lock mechanically held the apparatus in the shifted position — a solution to a physical strain problem, as the reference on Caps Lock describes. Its modern descendant, Sticky Keys, solves a related problem for anyone typing with one hand.

Electronic keyboards inherited the key and abandoned the mechanism. There is no apparatus to hold, no force to save, and no strain to relieve. What is left is a large, prominently placed toggle that most people activate only by accident.

The imitation is not even faithful. Typewriter shift lock affected every key, so numbers and punctuation produced their upper characters too. Computer Caps Lock in QWERTY layouts affects only letters, which means it does not actually reproduce the behavior it inherited its name and position from.

• A Capsoff campaign launched in 2006 asking manufacturers to remove the key entirely.
• Google dropped it from Chromebook keyboards in 2010, replacing it with a search key.
• Germany's DIN keyboard standard later made the Caps Lock function optional.
• It occupies the most valuable position on the keyboard — directly under the left little finger at home row.

That last point is why remapping it is so common among people who type heavily. The position is excellent and the function is nearly worthless, which makes it the single best candidate on the board for reassignment to Control, Escape or a modifier. It takes a few minutes and is one of the genuinely useful things you can do to a keyboard, unlike most equipment changes — the ones that do not help are examined in the honest math on layouts and keyboards.

Num Lock and the keypad that was two things

Num Lock looks pointless now and was essential once, for a reason that has physically disappeared from the keyboard.

Early keyboards had no separate arrow key cluster. The numeric keypad served both roles, and Num Lock was the toggle between them — digits when on, cursor movement when off. Look closely at a modern numeric keypad and the ghost is still visible: the arrows, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down are printed on the same keys as the digits, on almost every full-size keyboard sold today.

Dedicated arrow keys made the toggle unnecessary, but the secondary labels stayed and the key stayed with them. Its practical modern function is to occasionally be off when you expect it to be on, producing the familiar moment where the keypad refuses to type numbers.

The keypad itself is a different matter and remains genuinely valuable for anyone entering numbers in volume, where it is measurably faster than the number row because the hand never travels. That case, and how to learn it properly, is in 10-key typing on the numeric keypad. It is also the reason Alt codes fail on laptops, as covered in how to type special characters.

Print Screen, when printing was the point

Print Screen is the one legacy key that was successfully repurposed rather than abandoned, and its original behavior is exactly what the label says.

It sent the text contents of the display to an attached printer. That was a sensible thing to want when screens were transient, storage was scarce and paper was how anything got kept or shared. The reference on Print Screen records the transition from literal printing to screen capture.

The modern function — capturing an image of the screen — preserves the intent while changing the destination, which is why this key survived in active use while its neighbors did not. It is a useful reminder that legacy keys do not die because they are old; they die when nothing reinterprets them.

Function keys: the idea that never settled

The row of function keys represents an ambition that mostly failed, and understanding the ambition explains why they behave so inconsistently.

They were designed as programmable soft keys. Each application would assign its own meanings, and an on-screen legend or a physical template laid over the keys would tell you what they currently did. The count varied between manufacturers before settling at twelve, and the reference on function keys traces that consolidation.

The flaw was that software never agreed. Without conventions, users could not build reliable habits, and a key whose meaning changes between applications is a key most people stop reaching for. F1 became help by weak consensus and F5 became refresh in browsers, but beyond those the row is a patchwork.

The modern compromise is visible on most laptops, where the function keys are printed primarily as media and hardware controls with the F-key behavior behind a modifier. That is the market's verdict: brightness and volume are worth permanent space, and programmable soft keys are not.

Why nothing gets removed

The obvious question is why manufacturers keep producing keys that nobody uses, and the answer is not laziness or tradition for its own sake.

A keyboard is a compatibility surface. Removing a key means risking software that still expects it, diverging from a standard every other manufacturer follows, and imposing a change on hundreds of millions of people who already know the layout. The cost of keeping a useless key is a few square centimeters of plastic. The cost of removing one is borne by everybody else.

This is the same dynamic that has preserved the letter arrangement itself since 1878. The value of a keyboard lies substantially in how many people already know it, which makes any change expensive and any individual benefit small. It is why alternative layouts have never displaced QWERTY despite a century of advocacy, and why the claim that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down keeps circulating despite the evidence — a story covered alongside several related claims in the typing myths that refuse to die.

Where removal does happen is at the edges, where space is genuinely scarce. Laptops drop the numeric keypad. Tenkeyless and sixty-percent boards drop progressively more, usually keeping the functions available behind a modifier layer rather than deleting them outright. That is attrition driven by physical constraint rather than a decision that the keys are useless.

The keys that are genuinely essential

It would be easy to read all this as an argument that keyboard design is arbitrary. It is not — some elements are extremely well judged, and they are worth noticing precisely because they are invisible.

The bumps on F and J are the clearest example. They are tactile markers that let a touch typist find home position without looking, and every other key on the board is located relative to them. That is a piece of design aimed squarely at the human rather than at the machine, and the entire method of touch typing depends on it — as the complete ten-finger method sets out.

• The F and J bumps: the anchor the whole touch-typing method rests on.
• The space bar's size and central position, reachable by either thumb without moving the hands.
• Modifier keys duplicated on both sides, so combinations can be pressed by whichever hand is free.
• The stepped row offset, a mechanical artifact that turned out to be tolerable and is now familiar.

That mix is what makes the keyboard interesting as an object. It combines genuinely thoughtful ergonomics with fossilized accidents, and there is no visual difference between the two — the bumps on F and J and the SysRq key look equally like deliberate design decisions, and only one of them is.

The keys that were removed

One thing that makes the survivors look arbitrary is that you never see the ones that lost. The dead keys on your keyboard are not the complete set of obsolete keys — they are the subset that happened to be present when the standard layout crystallized.

Earlier terminal and teletype keyboards carried keys that have vanished completely. Line feed advanced the paper by one line without returning the carriage, which was a separate operation from carriage return — the two functions that survive today as the invisible characters at the end of a text file, and the reason different operating systems still disagree about how a line ends.

Form feed ejected the page. Repeat made the next key held down auto-repeat, before that behavior became automatic. Various terminals had keys for specific control codes, cursor addressing, or transmitting a block of text. None survive on a modern keyboard, and nobody misses them.

Two rows there are worth pausing on. Backspace and Enter are both survivors of exactly this process — they are legacy keys too, named after mechanical operations on a printing device, and they survived because their functions kept meaning something. That is the whole selection mechanism: a key persists if something reinterprets it, and disappears if nothing does.

Which puts SysRq in an unusual category even among dead keys. It did not have a function that became obsolete. It never had one to lose, and it survived anyway — carried along by a standard that had already been set by the time anyone noticed.

What to actually do with this

Most of this is context rather than utility, but a small practical residue is worth extracting.

If a spreadsheet's arrow keys start scrolling the whole sheet instead of moving the selection, you have pressed Scroll Lock. If your typing starts eating the text in front of it, you have pressed Insert. If the numeric keypad stops producing numbers, Num Lock is off. Each of those is a small mystery that resolves instantly once you know the key exists.

And Caps Lock is worth remapping if you type a great deal. It occupies the best position on the keyboard and performs a function most people actively do not want, which is an unusual combination and an easy win. Beyond that, the dead keys cost you nothing but the space they occupy.

The larger point is one that recurs whenever people look for equipment answers to typing problems. The keyboard is not what is limiting you. It is a compromised, historically contingent object that everyone competent has learned to use well anyway, and the variables that actually determine your speed are technique and practice — set out in a practice routine that actually moves the number, with the thresholds in what counts as an average typing speed.

There is something clarifying in that, actually. People who type quickly are not doing it on better hardware. They are doing it on the same nineteenth-century letter arrangement, surrounded by the same dead keys, with the same awkward stepped rows — and the difference between them and everyone else is entirely in the hands rather than in the object. A tool this compromised producing results this good is a reasonable argument that the tool was never the constraint.

Which is a strange note to end a history on, but it follows from the history. Every key described here survived because removing it was harder than keeping it, not because it earned its place. The keyboard you use is the accumulated residue of decisions made for reasons that expired decades ago, and it works anyway — because the part that matters was never the layout. It was the practice.