
Who Made That Escape Key? - sethbannon
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/magazine/who-made-that-escape-key.html
======
johnman
The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying
to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers
communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for
programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when
computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading
role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the
computer and say, “Cut it out.”

