Anyone ever seen one of these keys?

[dieselriot]

I've had this keyboard for the longest time and never knew what this key was for:

It's not the best keyboard around and it's pretty dirty but that's beside the point. I finally found out what the key does.

It's used to control the keyrate in the console. It doesn't work under X11 or Windoze from what I've tried. It seems to only work in the FreeBSD console. You press it with F1 through F7 and it'll give you a faster or slower keyrate. Pretty weird how this seems to be the only use. Maybe it was more common in the past and nowadays our console is the only thing that still supports it? Kinda like Scroll Lock?

 

[SirDice]

Back in the olden days PCs had a "turbo" button. It switched the CPU to a slower setting to allow old programs to run better on the newer (and intrinsically faster) CPUs.

The 'turbo' key on the keyboard however controlled the key repeat rate and had nothing to do with the CPU speed. Nowadays the key repeat rate is controlled via software (see kbdcontrol(1)).

Turbo button - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[astyle]

Clean that thing with some Grey Goose or Skyy. Stolichnaya is too good for that.

I've seen a KDE KControl module that you can use to control the key repeat rate.... No idea if that worked only for KDE stuff.

 

[Phishfry]

Those Chassis LED panels were set by jumpers. You could make it say whatever speed you wanted.
I am sure more than a few people were ripped off by them.

 

[SirDice]

Clean that thing with some Grey Goose or Skyy.

Take the keycaps off and just rinse them with a bit of water and detergent. Case can be cleaned and retro-brighted. It'll look as good as new.