Fun fact about caps lock is that it was originally called Shift Lock. It **mechanically** held down the shift key, which is why letters went from lower case to upper case.

This also resulted in numbers becoming symbols, and the punctuation keys being shifted, which doesn't occur with Caps Lock.

As for why shift lock was needed in the first place, or why the functionality changed when it became Caps Lock, I'm not sure.

It may have had to do with mainframes, which displayed all letters in upper case. I'm not sure how it stored things under the hood (other than being EBCDIC encoded, which can encode lower case letters), but I can personally attest that there was no apparent difference between f and shift+f.

#GrowNostr #keyboards #IT #ITHistory