email@hidden wrote:
| I think that the designers of the original Macintosh OS, having no
| particular homage owed to mainframes, or any other "legacy", non-GUI OS,
| were free to "Think Different" and did. They assigned the "bare" (there's
| that usage again) Function Keys in ways that would directly benefit users
No, they didn't. Not on the *original* Mac OS. Function keys on OS 9 and
earlier were just that: function keys. F1-F4 were expected to mean "cut",
"copy", "paste", and "undo", but that's the extent that OS 9 specified fixed
meanings for them. The OS 9 position was that the *user* controlled what the
function keys did:
There are two types of function keys, dedicated and nondedicated. The
nondedicated function keys--labeled F1 through F15--are definable by
the user, not by the application. F1 through F4 represent Undo, Cut,
Copy, and Paste in any applications that use these commands. [1]
OS 9 included a control panel allowing the user to define the keys. So OS 9
*also* didn't deliver function keys to applications, but not because it had
taken them over for its own purposes.
Glen Fisher
[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/HIGuidelines/
HIGuidelines-214.html#HEADING214-0 [split by Microsoft]
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