On 09/03/2012 10:45, Bernard Peek wrote:
On 08/03/12 22:38, Bob Eager wrote:
On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:52:48 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:04:48 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
F1 is the Windows standard way to open the Help menu in an
application, and has been since Windows 3, if not before.

Long before. It was documented as the preferred Help key on the very
first PC (there's a list of recommended keys in the original Technical
Reference Manual, circa 1981).

But didn't something for the PC use F3? Very hazy memory there... it
wasn't Wordperfect for DOS, was it?

I think it probably was. But they were a law unto themselves.

It was WordPerfect. The product existed before the IBM PC and was one of
the first word-processors available for the system. It's possible that
the choice of F3 was inherited from a previous version.

It was available on a number of platforms, and indeed did predate PCs
and their tradition of F1 for help. Later versions did let you rotate
assignments to put escape back on escape (default F1), repeat on F3
(default escape) and help on F1 (default F3)




--
Cheers,

John.

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