Caps Lock was originally Shift Lock on typewriters, and was adjacent to the Shift key because it was literally a mechanical locking device to hold the Shift key down.
Very much about keyboards today is derived from strange quirks that were part of typewriters for very good reasons, but have never been properly reevaluated once they were converted to electronical keyboards. Of course, the main goal likely has been to minimize friction for those users that were already used to typing on a typewriter.
Nonetheless, having switched to an Ergodox EZ about a year ago, I get more and more frustrated by standard keyboards and I'm wondering why ortholinear keyboards are not the default by now. Similarly, I find it very strange that a digital interface like USB HID doesn't allow the keyboard to specify unicode codepoints instead of key codes that then still have to be interpreted by the OS.
That is, of course I understand how we ended up where we are, but I'm constantly amazed by how conservative IT can be in some respects while changing on a dime in others.
The shallow response is the simple question: What are the Unicode code points for End, Calculator, F7, and Paste? These all have USB HID usages. (-:
True; OTOH, there already are control characters such as `BS`, `DEL`, `BEL` and so on that also don't make all too much sense if you look at unicode just as a collection of glyphs. So, I personally would still maintain that allocating a couple of blocks for stuff like this wouldn't hurt that much.
Also, no one said that the HID specs could not describe a superset of unicode (e.g. transmit letters with a unicode prefix and control signals normally (or something similar)). It's just that the way things are now is about the worst case in a lot of ways.
But: As things work good enough, they likely won't change for a long time, so going on about it certainly is futile, too ;-)
Whereas nowadays, everything is software-mappable. The actual hardware interface is agnostic as to the semantics of any particular key or chord. It effectively speaks entirely in terms of ISO 9995-1 key positions and a big bitmap. What any given key does is entirely software-programmable. (Apart from [Fn].) Even the nuttiness of the PC/AT backwards compatibility fake modifier keys is largely behind us.
We have regular keyboards with sometimes as many as 122 or 127 keys. The infamous "Space Cadet" keyboard had only 100 keys. Even the old 101-key U.S. PC/AT keyboard had more than that. We have gaming keyboards with even more keys, still, making use of the extensibility built into the protocol to have vendor-defined keys. (And there is even less of a relationship between those keys and Unicode than there are for the End, Calculator, F7, and Paste keys.)
Our applications know this, moreover. They don't only get told about characters. They know about key press and key release events, modifiers, and all sorts of special chords from [Alt]+[F4] to [Control]+[W].
We simply aren't using the old I-send-you-precomposed-characters terminal I/O paradigms in our input devices any more. Nor is that reflected in our WIMP user interfaces.
The original design is based on typewriters from the 1890s. Within a few decades the design constraints had already changed (hence e.g. the Dvorak layout, which is optimized for 1930s-style typewriters).
Anyhow, after the original typewriter and mid-20th-century teletype machines https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/ASR-33_a..., the biggest influences of modern keyboards are designers at IBM and German bureaucrats from about 1980.
A number of features of the German DIN office equipment standards forced significant (frankly arbitrary and unnecessary) changes on anyone who wanted to keep selling computers in Germany.
There was a wide variety in computer keyboard designs up through the 80s, and then somewhere in the mid-to-late 80s the IBM 101-key layout became entrenched, and we’ve been stuck with it ever since, except for marginal niche alternatives.
Was it worth the suffering?
Fun fact: Some home computers had both caps lock and shift lock.
I do sometimes use caps lock, when writing many words in all uppercase (used sometimes in computer programming; even in other text it may sometimes be used for titles and so on). (I also use num lock, both on and off. And also scroll lock, too, sometimes. I use all of the keys on the computer, sometimes.)
Remember that back then there were lot's of things where caps were meaningful. In early Fortran (and as I recall Algol and COBOL) reserved words were all-caps, so it wasn't weird to hit the caps lock and type for a while.
Not to mention the insert key without a state indicator, which these days would confuse the hell out of anyone who hits the key accidentally and didn’t understand why they were typing over everything.
There’s an incredible amount of computer history covering such small details. I love looking back and seeing how things have changed, besides the obvious things like storage media.
In fact, I bought parts for a new rig the other day and it blew my mind when the SSD I bought was a single chip I slotted in. It’s 500gig but the size changes your perception of it. The last time I did this I was hooking 2.5” SSDs through SATA and using a 3.5” HDD secondary with those crazy SCSI cables. Now it just slots in like a RAM chip.
PC building UX has changed a lot.