My first word processor was a DOS-based product called PC-Write, which ran off a 5.25" floppy drive (after you'd booted into DOS and removed that disk to insert the disk off which the application ran). It didn't support the (serial) mouse I acquired for my shiny new 8088, so I lived and died by key-combinations.
The one I used the most I learned the hard way--namely, CTRL + S. Because someone in one of the Schneider Hall PC labs bumped a cord and knocked an entire bank of PCs into segmentation fault. And there went my Econ 101 paper.
Not that CTRL + S saved me when my copy of PC-Write--I am not making this up--sucked most of my final project for History 402 into its Help files. The lab tech on duty was highly impressed ("Wow, I've never seen that happen before.") but otherwise unhelpful. I called my best friend (an MIS major) in panic. "Didn't you have a backup?" she asked, as if such an idea would, naturally, occur to a Liberal Arts major. My boyfriend (now husband) and I spent a goodly chunk of Spring break re-typing my work from the (mercifully fresh) dot-matrix printout that I had made for proofreading. I've since graduated from redundant floppies to key drives, but the important stuff still rides around in my backpack to this day.
I've been using tabbed browsing since the early part of the decade, when I chucked free IE and Netscape for payware Opera. I still catch myself using CTRL + T to spawn a new tab in my testing version of IE6. And, worse, in SQL Server Management Studio, which works about as well as CTRL + W does to close tabs in either application.
The Windows key plus the letter M doesn't work so well in Ubuntu either, although ALT + TAB does carry over from Windows (as I just now learned), as does the fabled three-fingered-salute.
Fortunately, CTRL + F, C and V seem to be almost universal, as does F1.
It's with no scant chagrin, then, that I realize that my fingers will probably be twitching in some key combination as my corpse goes into rigor mortis, most likely CTRL + END. Hmmm. Maybe the question is not so much how much I've been programmed as hard-wired...
