Tuesday 9 October 2012

Who Made That Escape Key?

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According to Jack Dennerlein of the Harvard School of Public Health, an expert on how humans interact with computers, the escape key helped drive the computer revolution of the 1970s and '80s. It says to the computer: 'Stop what you're doing. I need to take control.' In other words, it reminds the machine that it has a human master. But who invented the escape key?

(via Neatorama)

2 comment(s):

Bogdan said...

It's an interestingly structured article. It starts by explaining why we need an Esc key, then goes on to state out of thin air that the Esc key is obsolete and we still have it on our keyboards as a legacy key. In the end, the author takes this idea and runs with it, wondering if in 10 years' time we'll still be using keyboards at all. What have you been smoking, Mr. Kennedy?

NotMarian said...

I applaud the inventor of the undo key.