old keyboards with AWESOME mechanisms

I'm not from the 90s but I think it was for typing

Back in the day, Caps Lock worked differently. It would assume you were pressing the Shift key all the time, which is why pressing the period or comma keys would output '<' or '>' instead.

Fun fact caps lock used to be called shift lock because it was a shift key you could lock down

programming and data entry theory makes the most sense because early syntax

Probably was for typing. As, after a full-stop you use an upper case letter in the next sentence so you'd hold down shift. While typing you could accidentally hold shift key early and instead of a full-stop you got an arrow. The period / comma lock key would prevent this.

On some old keyboards, caps lock did ALL the keys, so if you were typing in caps and tried to do a . It would type a < super useful when writing documents before a lot of formatting was standardized and done for you. Like A. B. Or I. II. III. IV.

I think it was designed for the clerk at court. They had to type out the whole court case and accidentally typing something with shift would cause delay

the comma lock is useless lol

the caps lock key physically staying pressed down instead of using a modern led light is actually such a satisfying hardware feature

Makes video about cool mechanisms -> ignores huge display on top and talks about caps lock

I can FEEL the static shock from just LOOKING AT IT

Probably for the old ANSI C, where it included special punctuators with the <> signs to replace the [ ] { } symbols which werent present on some keyboards back then

Part of this is because of typewriters, because caps lock on typewriters was actually shift lock, and essentially you press down shift lock, and then you could type in all caps or with all the symbols you get when you shift, until you press down one of the shift keys, at which point shift lock would be unlocked. (Mechanical typewriter shift used to be an actual physical mechanism, where either The carriage with the ribbon would shift upwards, or the type bars would shift upwards, but either way you were physically shifting something.)

I guess when your yelling at people online and your like me and never use the capslock button

Typing in all caps with proper grammar when caps lock is broken

I had keyboards with these keys when I was young. I never used this key.

It's sounds good 👍🏼

the caps lock is genius

Or abbreviated, “CP Lock.”

The comma/period lock feature probably exists to prevent accidental typos when a user unintentionally holds the SHIFT key down while typing punctuation.