What is 'scroll lock' for?

[dan_esf_fanatic]

I've thought about this all my life but never bothered to ask. What does Scroll Lock do when it's turned on? It doesn't prevent scrolling since I can do that fine with it on. Everything seems to be running just as it is with it off. Can anyone tell me?

 

[MC]

The "Scroll Lock" key is pretty much obsolete. From my understanding, it was originally used to navigate around text with the use of the arrows keys, though Microsoft Excel still uses it.

 

[dan_esf_fanatic]

Ah, I see. So instead of the scroll thingy moving around lines of text, with scroll lock on you scroll with every press of the key, without having to scroll to the bottom of the screen first. Tho if only Excel uses it there's not much of a point to it, since I use OpenOffice.

 

[DJ-Ready]

you know, there was a time before graphical interfaces got invented and they already used keyboards like we do back in that times
Only they were missing the "windows key" ^^

 

[SA_Gohan]

Those were some dark and horrifically simple days . . . good times ^^

 

[Almighty_Gir]

*cuddles his spectrum*

 

[Chakra-X]

I would not know what to do without my graphic interface.

If I had to type in "run:/blahblahblah" (assuming that's how it works) just to open up internet explorer, I'd go mad.

 

[Kaination]

Scroll lock is for xfire !

 

[Phobius]

You know for the life of me I still cannot find that any key on my keyboard and I've been using a PC for probably about 18 years now oh well guess its a hidden key I'll never find.

 

[Pemalite]

You know for the life of me I still cannot find that any key on my keyboard and I've been using a PC for probably about 18 years now oh well guess its a hidden key I'll never find.

lmao, I can remember homer saying that...
Or hows about, You unplug your keyboard and reboot your computer.
My machine if I don't have the keyboard plugged in says:
"Keyboard error press F1 to continue".
(Stupid!!!!)

 

[DiebytheSword]

Back in the days of text based Operating Systems, a command like

C:\Dir

Would return multiple pages on your 640x480 unichrome monitor (IE, only one color and black).

You'd stop this in the early OS builds by hitting scroll lock, so you could see what was going on, line by line. Later OS builds had things like:

C:\Dir /p

Where it would stop you at the end of every full page of information.

Just an example, but there are many more.