Control, Alt and Delete, which was F12. Two reasons, and the first one is about hardware
rather than about the emulator.
ON REAL HARDWARE THIS IS NOT A KEY AT ALL. A Voyager has a button on the case, and what a
window has instead of a case is a gesture standing in for one. So it must not be a key
software might want - a machine with a keyboard has function keys on it and something will
eventually have a use for F12, which would have meant taking it away again later, from
programs already written to expect it.
And it must not be reachable by accident. Restarting throws away everything in memory, which
is the same data loss Escape was one keypress from causing, arriving by a different door.
Three keys together are not pressed by mistake.
It has meant this since 1981, so it is also the one gesture nobody has to be told the meaning
of - and Delete stays free for software, since the gesture is all three or nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
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