What is the usage of the Scroll Lock key?

Question

And Pause Break?

Tnx for the answers!!!



Ie

Answer 1

Scroll lock will temporarily lock the screen so the cursor will not scroll. It has never worked well, but it's been a fixture of keyboards for all the years I've seen them.

Pause/Break is another key that has little known, and relates back to the days of teletype. I doubt if anyone, including keyboard manufacturers, know why they still put such a useless key on the keyboard. At one time, Break was used in programming, but programmers now have special keyboards, so the standard one we use has these two buttons sticking up there that take up space!

Answer 2

Scroll lock key
A key found on a computer keyboard often located close to the keyboard pause key. The scroll lock key is intended to temporarily stop the scrolling of text or halt the operation of a program. There are not many software programs today that take advantage or have a use for this key.
Microsoft Excel is a good example of a software program that uses this key. If scroll lock is enabled on the keyboard when you press any of the arrow keys such as the down or up arrow keys the screen will move, however the selected cell will not move. However, if scroll lock is not enabled you will be able to navigate through each of the cells using the arrow keys



Pause key
Last modified: Sunday, September 01, 1996
A key that you can use to temporarily halt the display of data. Generally, you use the Pause key to freeze data that is being scrolled on the display screen. To continue scrolling, you can press any key.
In DOS, an alternative to using the Pause key is to use the MORE command, which displays one screenful of data at a time.

Answer 3

The Scroll Lock key is a remnant from the original IBM PC keyboard. In the original design, Scroll Lock was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. When the scroll lock mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In this usage, Scroll Lock is a modifier key like Alt and Shift (which modify the function of other keys) and, more specifically, a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released. Today, this particular use of Scroll Lock is rare. Only a few modern programs still honor this behavior, such as Microsoft Excel (in the behavior of arrows — when Scroll Lock is on, the selection does not move), Lotus Notes and Forté Agent. In modern GUI environments, scrolling is usually accomplished using newer means such as scrollbars or scroll wheels. Therefore Scroll Lock can be regarded as a defunct feature in almost all modern programs and operating systems

Pause key
This button pauses the display of data as it scrolls on a screen. It doesn’t really have a function in modern programs, but was more prominent in the good old days of bad old computers. In DOS it is the same as using the MORE command, which displays information one screen at a time (before scroll bars came along). It’s used in various other ways to pause things in programs.

Break Key
Apparently this goes back to when people still used telegraph. Telegraph was used to send morse code signals through lengths of wires that stretched over very great distances. This allowed messages to be sent quickly and easily. When the telegraph wasn’t in use, a steady signal was sent down the line. The break key could be used to stop the signal, indicating a message was about to be sent.

In computing circles, it seems that the break key doesn’t have a well-defined function. At least not any more. It used to have something to do with changing interactions with the computer, either between computers (such as terminating a modem connection) or between computer and user (such as logging off).

Although all 3 of these keys do not have a true function on the internet, they are used quite a bit when you are looging into a Mainframe computer or a middleware application like Unix

Answer 4

Scroll Lock is a carry over from DOS. Instead of moving the cursor, it allows you you to move you view L R U & D.
The pause/ctrl-break key was primarily for breaking out of DOS batch files but can work on some windows apps that get hung up waiting for a process to finish.

Answer 5

If you have scoll roller on your mouse, pushing the scroll lock stops it from going up and down the scrollbar. the pause/break is when running certain programs, but you dont need to worry about that since most programs dont use it anymore, usually its used for companies using programs by IBM.