Screen-labeled Function Keys

Screen-labeled function keys are a special case of function keys where keys are placed near a screen, which provides labels for them. These are most commonly found in kiosk applications, such as automated teller machines and gas pumps. They originated in aviation cockpits, such as the F-111..Hewlett-Packard developed them for use in computers/calculators in the 1970s. The HP 9830 desktop computer was the first calculator with two rows of 4 keys, over which a paper overlay would be placed. These were later adapted to terminals. Programmers found that the HP 2640 terminals could lock the top two lines of the screen, so they displayed the key functions there. Starting with HP 2647 terminal, the keys were re-arranged to correspond with 2 pairs of 4 labels at the bottom of the screen. These could be programmed by escape sequence or configuration screen. This would be further developed on the failed HP 300 Amigo, which used keys at the right side of the screen and HP 250 business computers which placed them at the bottom. By arranging functions in hierarchical trees, many functions can be implemented with only 8 keys.

Read more about Screen-labeled Function Keys:  Graphical Calculators, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words function and/or keys:

    The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.
    Erich Fromm (1900–1980)

    And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)