What Does the Pause/Break Key Do?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
874 words · ~4 min read
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alright so it's around 2 30 p.m you're stuck at work and you're desperate to
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get away for a coffee because your boss is breathing down your neck for
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i don't know a line graph or something but suddenly you glance down at your
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keyboard and you get an idea what would happen if i actually hit that
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key so you spring into action mashing your index finger down on it and as it
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bottoms out your boss freezes and a delightful coffee appears right in front
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of you pause break am i right well
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no no i'm not right so what is the break
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button actually there for then i mean unlike the scroll lock key which
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you can learn more about up here it doesn't even toggle that little light on
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your keyboard well the origins of the break key
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actually go all the way back to the 1800s when zesty memes were sent via
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telegraph rather than the internet back then if two people were
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communicating via teleprinter one person could press break to break the circuit
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which effectively interrupted the sender and let them know that the other end
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needed to transmit something this usually happened when one new source
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that was sharing a telegraph line with others has some breaking news to report
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but even though teleprinters have long been obsolete the break keys stuck
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around on computer keyboards as a means to stop or terminate a running program
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now this functionality was much more common back before graphical operating
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systems were a thing but for fun you can still use control plus break to
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terminate a program in dos or in other text only environments but on a more
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practical note you might also still see a system administrator using the break
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key if a pc is connected to a mainframe and they have to interrupt the boot
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process to recover a password but that doesn't have much applicability
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to you folks at home does it so a far more common use for you would be to
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pause that flow of text you might see on your own computer at boot time like if
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you'd like to see BIOS messages that might help you understand or troubleshoot
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any issues you're having now it doesn't work on every pc but gives a shot the
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next time you fire up your system if you're curious the pause button will
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also stop any huge avalanche of text scrolling down your screen if you're
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using command prompt and even if you can't be bothered to care about anything
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that has to do with old school command line computing there are still two
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modern applications for pause break holding down the Windows key and
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pressing pause break will bring up your system property screen and some games
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will let you press pause to pause your gameplay makes sense right it
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does make me wonder why that isn't the standard but even if your favorite game
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doesn't use the pause key for this purpose you can always use hotkey
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software to make this extraneous button do whatever you'd like be it in games or
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in adobe premiere just whatever you program it to do don't expect it to
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bring a halt to those incessant work messages about how you need to find a
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way to make episodes about obscure keyboard buttons more compelling
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Linus alright thanks for watching guys like
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