Why are there num lock, caps lock and scroll lock lights on keyboards?

Question

Almost everything else is indicated on the screen. Why aren’t these indicators shown on the taskbar or menu bar instead?

In: 0

Answer 1

They didn’t always have screen indicators.

Back in the day a terminal was 80 characters wide and 25 characters high. You already lost lines when you had any kind of TUI (Text User Interface), so you really didn’t want to give up more real estate than necessary.

Also, I can’t find the documentation for it, but I remember that on really old models, the logic of the Lock keys were actually handled in the keyboard circuitry and not at the PC level, but someone may need to confirm?