Keystroke that
restarts an
Apple computer.
Any of them, pretty much, as far as i can tell. It worked on my Apple //c and it works now on the macintosh, although the apple key has been renamed to command and the reset key is now that funky macintosh key with the triangle pointing left. Spend any amount of time with a macintosh, and you will become **really fucking acquainted** with this keystroke.
Steve Jobs originally had a dictum that if any programmer wrote a bootable program that was incapable of restarting itself if it crashed, that programmer would soon be looking for work elsewhere. Hence the low-level reset routines that have become a part of apple's worldview. Of course, in the time since Steve first left apple, that's become less set in stone; most power macs have special extreme circumstances under which they will crash really really hard and software reboots will be totally impossible. When this happens you're left having to hit the hardware reset key, which is hidden somewhere fairly obvious on the front of casing-- unless you have one of the shitty rev A imacs, in which case (i still have no clue what they were thinking) the hardware reset key is on the side, next to the usb ports, and requires a **paper clip** to set off. This means that if a rev a imac ever crashes on you in this manner, you wind up having to unplug it and plug it back in.
The Apple //, by the way, would not automatically reset on apple-control-reset. You had to hit it a couple times before the reset actually took. Before that, the first couple hits, apple-control-reset would kind of function as an odd über-break, fucking up the screen or (if you got really lucky) dropping you into the Apple //'s built in hexadecimal memory debugger. Or if you just started up the Apple // and then hit apple-ctrl-reset at the Check disk drive. message, you would be dropped into a fully functional Microsoft BASIC environment running off the interpreter in the ROMs. You could actually sit there, punching in line numbers and list and run commands (and i did, quite a lot, when i was six..) (i had almost no clue what i was doing, and for the longest time this was the only way i knew how to get into a place i could write BASIC..) although writing BASIC this way is to be *strongly* recommended against because if the BASIC interpreter was entered into in this funkified manner, you would be unable to save or retrieve anything from disk. Entering any disk commands would (let the circle remain unbroken) .. drop you into the Apple //'s built in hexadecimal memory debugger! where you would be very confused.
As confusing as this may be to those of you accustomed to Windows multitalented system keystrokes, apple-control-reset and command-option-esc are totally unrelated.
Update: The Apple "reset" key is no more, replaced with an
"eject cd" key.
Let us mourn its passing. To restart a mac, you must now either press
the button with the little triangle on the front of the
case, or press the power button on the case and hold it down for several seconds.