System Request: Fill & Download for Free

The PrintScreen (and SysReq) is a holdover from the old days of dumb terminals and mainframes.On the IBM 3270 terminal and similar old-school mainframe terminals, the PrintScreen key would instruct the mainframe to take everything currently displayed on the monitor and dump it to the mainframe’s line printer.(Image: Wikimedia Commons)IBM is extremely conservative. When they developed the first IBM PC, they kept the PrintScreen key, only on a PC it would dump the screen to whatever was attached to the LPT port.It doesn’t make sense to dump a graphical screen to a line printer, so when Windows came along, the PrintScreen key took a snapshot of what was in the screen and copied it to the clipboard. (I personally think this is kind of stupid. It should save it to a file instead, since the overwhelming majority of the time, that’s what people want to do. Oh well.)On some keyboards, the PrintScreen key is labeled PrintScreen/SysReq. SysReq is System Request. In mainframe days, you would hit System Request when you sat down at a terminal to tell the mainframe, “This terminal is now in use. Pay attention to it.”On the PC, the System Request key has never, to my knowledge, had any meaning or done anything. But IBM included it because they had it on their old mainframe terminals, and it’s still there to this day because IBM included it.

Our school system requests that parents not call or text individual students as the sounds produced by those things could give away the position of hidden children. So I would follow that rule. They also ask that parents not show up at the school or call the school. That way they can handle the crisis at hand.I would go to the area of the school and be ready to pick up my child. I would be repeatedly checking my phone for news or a call/text from my child.Honestly, I’d also be praying.

All keyboards, even spill-proof keyboards:Liquids sweetened with sugar, honey, corn syrup, etc.Dirty or sticky fingersGranulated or powdered solidsGrease and oilsEven when off or disconnected:Heavy things keeping a key depressedOn laptop and notebook computer keyboards:Anything, that when the computer is closed, would break the computer surface, display, or hinge, e.g pencil or pen, plastic eating utensil, coin, earphonesWith regard to useless keys:Since the birth of the IBM PC in 1981, nothing that I know of has used “Scroll lock.”Only a few SNA 3270 terminal emulators ever had any use for “System Request.”“Pause” hasn’t been useful since OS/2 and Windows NT, since it stopped the whole computer until another key was pressed.“Break” did what is typically done with <Ctrl>c. I don’t know what, if anything pays attention to “break” nowadays.“Windows” key, at least usually for me, since I normally run ubuntu linux.