WHY DO WE NEED A LOCK.

AND THE GB IS SLIPPING

Caps?

I like caps.




I can't write if my pen is capless. I'll spend hours looking for a good one

I also don't write in blue ink. It skeeves me out

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I also don't write in blue ink. It skeeves me out

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Me, too. I have left meetings to go back to my office to get the proper black pen rather than mess up my notebook by writing with a borrowed blue pen. Shudder. Furthermore, I buy my own pens because purchasing people can never get it right, and they don't understand when I freak out because I am pretty laid back about everything else.

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WHY DO WE NEED A LOCK.

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It's interesting that you should ask this. As it happens, Caps Lock is a hold over from typewriters, which used to contain a Shift Lock key. This was because typewriters required a two contact points on each typebar in order to accomodate upper and lower case letters. The upper case character was typically positioned above the lower case, so holding down shift key literally shifted the type bar aparatus so that the upper case letters would strike the ink ribbon. It was more difficult to type while holding down a shift key since typewriters required a heavier amount of force to punch a key. Therefore, the Shift Lock key was introduced to fix the typebar apparatus in the uppercase position, which allowed the typist to produce capitalized letters without needing manually maintain the shifted position.
Now, you might be asking yourself why I'm talking about typewriters. Well, it seems that when personal computers were first coming out back in the late 70s, manufacturers made the wise decision to make the keyboards as similar to a typewriter as possible. You see, getting buy-in from a new user is important when you are introducing a disruptive technology, so this made the computer "familiar" to the grannys of the 20th century. As such, the Caps Lock key became a mainstay, however it wasn't until around 1984 that the Caps Lock key became fixed in it's standard position. You can thank IBM for that.
Since humans are creatures of habit, it seems that the Caps Lock has survived all this time for little other reason than "that's just the way we've always done it". Which brings us full circle to your question: "Why do we need it?". Well, many people think we don't. It's a bit of a vestigial mainstay and you'd be happy to know that people are increasingly beginning to agree with your skepticism. In fact, Google's Chromebook does not contain a Caps Lock key. Personally, I wonder whether we will ever truly be rid of the Caps Lock. It seems to me that keyboards may become irrelevant long before Caps Lock truly becomes a thing of the past. Even then, I can imagine Google or Apple or some other super awesome tech company that I don't even know about coming up with speech recognition that adjusts content of capitalization to the proportion of voice volume to ambient noise; a sort of voice activated Caps Lock, if you will. This very mystery, in fact, has caused me to lose many nights of sleep.

Hot fries

It still bugs me that the carriage doesn't return when I slap the monitor after a line feed.

i never use caps

mark

I have a subcontractor that only types in Caps Lock. I'm not sure if he's an idiot, or if he doesn't know what he is doing. Sounds kind of old on the phone, so I guess I'll attribute it to that.

Everything at work is in caps. File names, drawing notes. There is much less confusion when only 26 letters are used instead of 52.

Never confuse I and l.

Shout out to all people whose handwriting is all caps! All uppercase letters.