shift+break

At school we had lots of BBC Micros. When I was near the start of school, these were very new indeed and almost none of the teachers or classroom helpers knew how to use them.

When you turned it on, you got a beep and a relatively unfriendly command prompt along the lines of: Acorn MOS >

To load and run the default program off a removable disk, they had a shortcut key combination: press shift+break to get that behaviour.

Easy, right? Except very few people understood instructions along the lines of "press shift and break together" to mean "depress shift and keep it depressed. Press and release Break quickly as if typing a letter. Release Shift".

So instead, minutes of pressing shift and break together, trying really hard to get them at the same time, would ensue at the start of each session until accidentally shift got pressed before the break.

HTML forms in the early 90s

Before HTML forms used the <form> tag, there was a simpler mechanism called <ISINDEX>. I was reminded about this because someone asked why CGI examples showed urls without name=value pairs in the ?query section, like this: http://ive.got.syphil.is/disease-registry.html?pox

I then went to see if <ISINDEX> still worked in modern browsers. I discovered that in
Safari, it renders a box, but there seems to be no way to submit the query (traditionally, pressing enter would submit it). Lynx and w3m still support it.

From others, I hear:

apparently the default browser on the g1 doesn't even recognize isindex as some sort of input field, although it renders it as such.
sort of weird; won't let you type in it but it renders an input box

and Chrome is also reported to work correctly.

Anyway, this post has an isindex tag right here:



<--- there, so you can see how it works in your browser...