alt Hacker News> In the 90's I had this vision that the menu and the scrollbar should be physically separated from the screen.
Buttons alongside, above, or below screens appear now and then. Some early terminals had them. Now that seems to be confined to aircraft cockpits and gasoline dispensers.
Replies
Findecanor • yesterday at 6:17 AM
BTW. The technical term for such a button is a "soft key", vs a "hard key" that has a single function.
Other applications ...
Some ATMs have unmarked physical buttons next the screen and tge text displayed on the screen next to those buttons defines what the key does.
TV remotes have A/B/C/D (red/blue/green/yellow) physical buttons whose function is dynamically defined by your context or which setting / function / menu you are currently inside.
I guess this goes back to video game controllers that have A/B X/Y buttons that can have different Functions in different contexts.