Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 July 10

= July 10 =

PC crashed when pressing Shift + 4
In my primary school, the school got four used PCs from Nokia in the late 1980s. They ran MS-DOS as Windows was only in its early stages at the time. They had two internal 3.5" floppy drives with no hard drives. Video output was CGA or EGA.

Anyway, onto my question. When I loaded up GW-BASIC, pressing Shift + 4 (which was supposed to type the eurodollar sign ¤ on the Finnish keyboard) crashed the computer. This happened consistently throughout the lifetime of the computers. Pressing AltGr + 4 (which typed the dollar sign $) worked perfectly.

Whatever could have caused this? J I P &#124; Talk 01:12, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * A bug in GW-BASIC? Ruslik_ Zero 07:28, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Glancing over the documentation, GW-BASIC seems to only expect ASCII characters. Possibly it handled running across non-ASCII characters less than gracefully. 96.246.93.192 (talk) 07:08, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * (Also, looking it up further the ¤ character didn't exist in any character set at all until almost 4 years after GW-BASIC came out.) 96.246.93.192 (talk) 07:16, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * GW-BASIC was happy with Nordic characters such as Ä and Ö, which aren't included in ASCII either. Perhaps the ¤ sign was a special case. J I P  &#124; Talk 15:40, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Out of curiosity I loaded GW-BASIC up in a DOS virtual machine with the keyboard set to Finnish and tried it out. It seemed to ignore all the Nordic characters (including ¤), when typed they echoed as expected but when I hit enter it seemed to parse the line as if they didn't exist, but it didn't hang or crash. Further experimentation was limited by the fact I don't actually have a real Finnish keyboard and none of my US keyboard keys seemed to map to ". 96.246.93.192 (talk) 05:10, 14 July 2021 (UTC)
 * It might have been some kind of bug in GW-BASIC in combination with the actual physical computer. It is impossible to reproduce now, the physical computers were given away for recycling decades ago. J I P  &#124; Talk 02:46, 15 July 2021 (UTC)