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NewsThe Longest-lived Shortcut Key In Personal ComputingstaffTerrence Dorsey10 Mar '13 - 10:41 
I didn't get my hands on VisiCalc until 1981. The first thing any Apple ][ VisiCalc user had to know was that the '/' (forward-slash) key brings up the menu on the top row of the screen. You used the left and right arrow keys to pick a top-level command, and hit RETURN. At least some of the commands then had a sub-menu which would appear on the second row, and then you'd hit RETURN again to execute the command. It was a really elegant system for using just four keys to represent a command hierarchy on two lines of all upper-case text, just 40 characters long. That was about 8% of the total available screen real estate, which was otherwise occupied by some status readouts - location, cell contents, formula, etc.
To this very day in Office 2010 on Windows the '/' key puts focus on the "Ribbon".

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