> key labelled "Help". I wish this had become part of standard keyboard layouts decades ago

it was called F1

This sort of response is why people dislike techies. Arbitrary codes are how you get a priesthood, and that's not a good thing.

And the very fact of the Function keys' configurability meant that they couldn't be relied upon to always do some specific thing, which kind of let devs off the hook. If nobody's going to try pressing F1 anyway, you may as well not bother to make it do anything. Vicious cycle. (See also, and even worse: the "What is This?" window caption-button in Windows, that invoked a modal "Context Help" mode. It was so non-discoverable — and optional! — that I don't know of a single third-party that ever bothered enabling their software to use it.)

On the other hand, if there's a key on the user's keyboard explicitly labelled "Help", then as a developer you'll feel somewhat obligated to put some informative documentation into your app that appears when "Help" is pressed. "Burning" a help function into the hardware, takes away the developer's choice in whether they want to offer help or not, without needing to impose any sort of centralized QA process. The QA process is something the dev will be incentivized to do on their own, when faced with the realization of the inevitability of users' frustrated expectations when they think pressing "Help" will get them some help. :)

It’s exactly the kind of response you see on HN unfortunately

This is true, but there is another issue: people who are not techies are not held up to the standard they should be when using computers. If you work with certain software, it is your job to learn to use it well. And if you screw things up because you didn't take the bother to learn how to do it properly, then it is not "the system's fault".

You have to be proficient at least with the system you are using, but people want to use software that is intuitive, even when the task is complex.

>This sort of response is why people dislike techies.

Enter was called "return"..and you know why? Typewriters...carriage return, if you have already functions why no use it? You want a Copy/Paste button too?

Some keyboards tailored for office applications do have copy/paste/help/browse the internet/launch spreadsheet keys.

>internet/launch

Yes the thing who needs 10y old dell software and always opens IE even if something else is the standard browser ;)

Enter and return, while often interchangeable are not always and some keyboards have separate enter and return keys.

Also, some keyboards like sun's and some serial terminals had dedicated copy, paste, &c.

No, F3 is help. F1 is cancel.

https://retrothing.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/wp51.jpg

Most confusing imho is Ctrl+C means Copy in one context, and SIGINT in another.

I thought F1 was the ‘continue’ key...?

The old sun keyboards had a few keys like that. My favorite was the “again” key :)

I feel obligated to add a link to the space-cadet keyboard with its many, many modifier and command keys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

The Hyper-7 is a spiritual successor to the Space Cadet keyboard:

https://groupbuys.mechboards.co.uk/shop/hyper-7-keyboard-r3/

It's a beast.

Do any of those extra keys even work in today’s apps and OSs? What does the Call button even do? Are they essentially macro keys you have to program so they produce a series of keys?

Yes, they're all really just macro keys. Hyper-7 runs on QMK, so you can make any one of those keys do more or less whatever you want.

The first keyboard to have like and dislike keys!

The old Bloomberg keyboards had a separate "Help" key. However, the new one merged it again with the "F1” key.

Amigas have a Help key. I can't think of any software that actually uses it, though.

plenty do—frexxed and resource off the top of my head—which is why the fact that my externalized a1200 keyboard solution not mapping the help key is super annoying

Yeah, same on the Atari ST. Almost nothing used it.

the help key on old sun boxes was rarely ever helpful

Amiga had a help key.

It did nothing