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October 22, 2020 11:05 pm

IT'S INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY

bobstreo informs us that it's CAPS LOCK DAY and shares an excerpt about its history: Caps Lock Day first came to pass in the year 2000, when Derek Arnold of Iowa decided that he, like so many other internet users, had simply had enough of people using all caps to emphasize themselves on the web. So he created Caps Lock Day in the interest of poking fun at people who use this abomination of a typing style, and to finally bring some sanity to the net. On mechanical typewriters, the Caps Lock key was first the Shift lock key. One of the earlier innovations in the use of typewriters saw a second character being added to each typebar. This caused the number of characters that a person was able to type to be doubled with the same number of keys being used. The second character was located above the first on each typebar's face, and the Shift key would cause the apparatus in its entirety to move, physically shifting the typebars position relative to the ribbon of inx. Just like in contemporary keyboards for computers today, the shifted position was used to create secondary characters and product capitals. The invention of the Shift lock key was for the purpose of maintaining the shift operation indefinitely without continual effort. The typebars were mechanically locked in a shifted position, resulting in the upper character being typed when any key was pressed. This was also supposed to lower finger muscle pain caused by repetitive typing because it could be challenging to hold the shift down for more than two or three consecutive strokes prior to this. On mechanical typewriters, you would typically hit both Lock and Shift at the same time. After this, you press shift by itself in order to release the lock.

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