Power-control keys on PC keyboards

[Hak Foo]

I notice there seems to be a narrow window when they started outfitting PC keyboards with a "Power", "Sleep", "Wake" or similar key set.

I think sometimes, this was labelled as "Windows 98 style", the way adding Windows and Menu keys made a board "Windows 95 style"

Frequently, this was done by moving the editing block down a row, and printscreen/pause/scroll lock, and putting those new keys in that spot, thus creating havoc for people who use the editing block.

However, this seems to have vanished almost as quickly as it occured.

Discussion questions:

1)  What happened to trigger, then halt, the trend?  While it's sort of concurrent with the deployment of the ATX standard-- allowing soft power on/off-- it was nowhere near universal at the time... probably not til 2001 or 2002 would even all new mainboards be ATX.

2)  Why did they converge on that location, instead of, say, rearranging the LEDs and putting the switches there?

3)  Would it still work today?  Were they ever reliably working?  I don't see scancodes for it in things like layout editor tools, and I note that it seems more prevalent on pre-USB keyboards, so I wonder if the USB spec doesn't support it

[E TwentyNine]

Soarer's code has the keycodes for the power and multimedia keys, and they work fine.

[Findecanor]

They are in a different "usage table" from keyboard keys and multimedia keys in the USB spec, so there would have to be yet another message just for these three keys: More complexity and more bandwidth usage. That may explain it.
The power/sleep/wake keys are mostly found on PS/2 keyboards, am I right?

[user 18]

I also remember seeing a lot of boards with power/sleep keys above the function row, more similar to the keys on a remote than to the keys on a keyboard.

Never even attempted to use them myself.

[False_Dmitry_II]

My rubber dome had them between the arrows and the 'editing block'. The one for shutting down the computer was the furthest to the left and therefore the closest to everything else around it. This led to shutting down the computer accidentally alot, until I had had enough and took it apart then threw the actual shutdown button away.

Not sure what is meant by ATX, the standard must be much older than that, I've seen pentium II cases that clearly held ATX form factor motherboards, and could be reused today if the lack of case fans were not a problem.

[user 18]

Not sure what is meant by ATX, the standard must be much older than that, I've seen pentium II cases that clearly held ATX form factor motherboards, and could be reused today if the lack of case fans were not a problem.

Off topic a bit, but I have a server in one of those old cases. Case fans aren't a problem, I just drilled out enough holes for the airflow to make a difference

[Hak Foo]

I mean the ATX mainboard standard.  As I understand it, that showed around 1997 or 1998, but I know you could easily get AT boards and power supplies til '99 and later.  My first ATX rig wasn't until 2000, with a Socket 370 533MHz Celeron.

[False_Dmitry_II]

ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended) is a motherboard form factor specification developed by Intel in 1995, first sentence on wikipedia. I know nothing about how long the previous ran, however. I just knew that any old computer I ever look at has generally been some ATX variant.

Not sure what is meant by ATX, the standard must be much older than that, I've seen pentium II cases that clearly held ATX form factor motherboards, and could be reused today if the lack of case fans were not a problem.

Off topic a bit, but I have a server in one of those old cases. Case fans aren't a problem, I just drilled out enough holes for the airflow to make a difference

I have one in a PIII case, I really need to check temps at some point to see if its an issue, at least towards the hard drives. When I said that I more meant for anything approaching the heat envelope of a gaming box, because those things are fairly solidly made.

[user 18]

ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended) is a motherboard form factor specification developed by Intel in 1995, first sentence on wikipedia. I know nothing about how long the previous ran, however. I just knew that any old computer I ever look at has generally been some ATX variant.

Not sure what is meant by ATX, the standard must be much older than that, I've seen pentium II cases that clearly held ATX form factor motherboards, and could be reused today if the lack of case fans were not a problem.

Off topic a bit, but I have a server in one of those old cases. Case fans aren't a problem, I just drilled out enough holes for the airflow to make a difference

I have one in a PIII case, I really need to check temps at some point to see if its an issue, at least towards the hard drives. When I said that I more meant for anything approaching the heat envelope of a gaming box, because those things are fairly solidly made.

I would check temps right now, but my boot drive just decided to s*** itself. Nothing like a Ubuntu install that doesn't realize what either 'ls', 'su', or 'sudo' mean.  Before I installed fans, I had HDD temps in the low 40s (celsius), I'm hoping it's in the 30s now.

[omnigeek]

I'm guessing the sleep/wake keys vanished for the reason the OP mentioned -- creating havoc when trying to use the editing keys.  We had some systems at work with those power/sleep keys, and I and others were always hitting them by accident, so we'd have to go into the power options Control Panel applet and disable them.  One keyboard type had a little round sleep/wake button in the top-left corner, and I would always swat that by accident when I was going for the Esc key... really annoying!

I'm not sure if we had any USB keyboards like this, but I kind of doubt it,  I think they were PS/2.   As far as I know they would still work on current systems today, but I'd have to try one to know for sure.   I don't remember that we had to load any special drivers, etc. to get it to work (if so, we would have left those out since we didn't want those keys to work in the first place, haha).