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I seem to recall that F1 and F2 had some sort of hard wired functions (that were printed on my keyboard) but I don't remember which they were...



There was never any that much hardwired functions for F1 and F2 on PC (apart for the convention that F1 is almost always help).

On the other hand there is a related issue: on DEC (and some other) terminals with LK201-style keyboards (which in turn inspired the "modern" PC/AT keyboard layout with F1-F12) the keys in positions of F1-F5 had fixed functions. This is the reason why there are about four different escape sequences across vt220-compatible terminal emulators for F5. There simply was not any DEC terminal that had F5 on its keyboard (F1-F4 are almost always mapped to PF1-PF4).


F1 was already Help by then I'm pretty sure




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