Colour me confused

It’s a relief to get back to the really important issues. For example, how the Alt-Gr key got its name. We begin with an exciting – yet not particularly true – story from James Bostock.
‘IBM’s PC keyboards used to have multicoloured lettering. Alt functions were red, Shift items blue, etc. When all the keys were used up they added some green-coloured characters. But what should they call the new key they added to access these characters? With typical IBM creativity, they came up with the name Alt, but in green to differentiate it from the Alt (red). When the cost of producing rainbow-lettered keyboards became prohibitive, the new key was labelled Alt-Gr, for green. At least, that’s the tale I was told when I was working
for Big Blue.’ You should have heard some of the stories they tried to tell us at the time, James.
The consensus view, however, seems to be that represented by Adam Dempsey: ‘Alt-Gr means Alternate Graphics, but it isn’t used nowadays.’ The graphics that we have being quite sufficient.
At Avena Carpets, a reader who chooses to remain anonymous decided to try out the key following our dramatic exposé.
‘No one in our office had any idea what it was for,’ he says. ‘I decided to show the article to our secretary, in case there were any useful shortcuts she could use. Three minutes later and the entire screen had turned upside down. Rebooting didn’t work, so I started pressing keys much in the same way as she had done before - randomly - as she rang our local IT guy.’
Luckily, the random key approach worked. But let that be a lesson to you all.