Historical Development
Before the computer mouse was widespread, arrow keys were the primary way of moving a cursor on screen. Mouse keys is a feature that allows controlling a mouse cursor with arrow keys instead. A feature echoed in the Amiga whereby holding the Amiga key would allow a person to move the pointer with the arrow keys in the workbench(OS), but most games require a mouse or joystick. The use of arrow keys in games has come back into fashion from the late 1980s and early 1990s when joysticks were a must, and were usually used in preference to arrow keys with some games not supporting any keys. It can be used instead of WASD keys, to play games using that keys.
The inverted-T layout was popularized by the Digital Equipment Corporation LK201 keyboard from 1982.
Some Commodore 8-bit computers used two keys instead of four, with directions selected using the shift key.
The original Apple Macintosh had no arrow keys at the insistence of Steve Jobs, who felt that people should use the mouse instead. They were deliberately excluded from the Macintosh launch design as a forcing device, acclimating users to the new mouse input device and inducing software developers to conform to mouse-driven design rather than easily porting previous terminal-based software to the new platform. Arrow keys were included in later Apple keyboards. Early models with arrow keys but no middle section (Home, End, etc.) placed them in one line below the right-hand Shift key in an HJKL-like fashion; later versions had a standard inverted-T layout, either in the middle block or as half-height keys at the bottom right of the main keyboard.
Read more about this topic: Arrow Keys
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or development:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“Ultimately, it is the receiving of the child and hearing what he or she has to say that develops the child’s mind and personhood.... Parents who enter into a dialogue with their children, who draw out and respect their opinions, are more likely to have children whose intellectual and ethical development proceeds rapidly and surely.”
—Mary Field Belenky (20th century)