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From: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Scroll lock (maybe a dumb question)
Message-ID: <1991Mar22.200816.1136@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 91 20:08:16 GMT
References: <66886@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <40442@cup.portal.com> <67011@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
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Reply-To: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
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In-Reply-To: v053qgzj@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (David M Snyderman)

In article <67011@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>, v053qgzj@ubvmsb (David M Snyderman) writes:
>Scroll lock has something to do with the scrolling of the 
>original Lotus Windows.

Talk about confusing the effect with the cause...

IBM introduced `scroll lock' to allow an application to give the arrow
keys an additional level of meaning, namely to control scrolling.
Lotus 1-2-3 is one of the more popular programs that use it for this
purpose.  (Borland's SideKick also uses it.)  Most applications,
however, blithely ignore the `scroll lock' key and use some other
nonstandard way of controlling scrolling.

Lotus certainly didn't invent `scroll lock'; in fact, it could
be argued that Lotus was just `following the rules'.  `Scroll lock'
turned out to be a standard that never caught on.  Such is life.