The ESC key on the computer keyboard is a very special key

Danle Ryan says the ESC key is a way of interacting with the computer, just as people are saying to the computer, "stop your work and I need to take over control right now." In other words, this is a reminder to the computer that it is still a machine and that human beings are its masters. If astronauts in space Odyssey 2001 have such a handy button, they will be able to immediately stop the evil computer, Hal, from committing a crime. 2001:a

In fact, the ESC key was designed by an IBM programmer named Bob Benmore (Bob bemer) in 1960 to try to solve a problem with Babel: to allow computers from different vendors to communicate in different encodings. Moore invented the ESC key, allowing programmers to switch from one encoding to another. Then, when the computer code is standardized, the ESC key becomes a "abort" button on the PC computer, which is suspended from the computer.

Why do you choose the word "escape"? Interrupt could use other words, such as "abort", but he finally chose "ESC" to commemorate his own worries. He was a sentimental man, and as early as the 70 's, he began to worry about the IYCC millennium bug. Now that our computers are relatively stable, no one needs to panic. But Bob says he's still using the ESC key. "Preparedness is always good," he said. ”

Why do outdated keystrokes like ESC continue to exist? There are some legacy things in our equipment. In the past more than 100 years, when people wanted to write something, they sat down at a typewriter. But now computers look very different, they're like smartphones. Maybe 10 or 15 years from now, the whole keyboard will become very strange. Then we might say, "Remember the tools we used to enter?" ”

In the future, how do we manipulate computers without typing? Think about the Wii and Kinect, or the "Guitar Hero" game's dedicated input device. We may see more and more of these new input modes, such as speech recognition and audio control, such as Siri.