AN ARGUMENT FOR GETTING RID OF THE PHYSICAL "CAPS LOCK" KEY

Daniel Colin James thinks it's time to get rid of the CAPS LOCK key on physical keyboards.

Why? Partly because it's a relic of history, created in the 60s by the Bell Labs engineer Doug Kerr, who noticed that people often wanted to type street addresses in all caps -- but there was no key in existence that would capitalize letters but not numbers.

Colin James actually called up Kerr, who's still around, to get the story, which is quite interesting. As Colin James writes on Medium ...

The QWERTY keyboard debuted in 1873 on a typewriter that could only produce capital letters. A few years later came the Shift key, which toggled the typewriters output between lowercase and uppercase letters.

The Shift key physically shifted the internals of the typewriter, so it took some effort to press it down. Eventually, a Shift Lock key was created to hold it down. With Shift Lock engaged, letter keys produced their uppercase counterparts, but number keys produced symbols. That was a problem.

Doug Kerr was a telephone engineer working at Bell Labs in the 1960s. He watched his bosss secretary repeatedly get frustrated after accidentally typing things like $%^& instead of 4567 in addresses because of Shift Lock.

So he did something about it. Doug Kerr invented the CAP key. CAP performed the same function as Shift Lock, except it only affected the letter keys.

CAP became Caps Lock, which made its way onto the computer keyboard, where it has remained part of the standard layout ever since.