Go back further. Windows 95 had good reason for OSR2, and Windows 3.0 was pretty much unusable until 3.1.

Operating systems are major projects - usually the largest and most complicated piece of software on any computer. The first major version is always deeply flawed. The are just too big to get everything right first time.

I have noticed the speckly too, but could not work out the mechanism behind it.

Not quite, but it's close enough to provide the illusion that it does. The discrepancy is easily seen by holding a picture of the blue sky up to the actual blue sky. In a side-by-side comparison you can see that the color is only approximate.

I considered the academic path, but rejected it as too high-risk. Instead I went into IT support, where I knew I could be confident of always finding employment - albeit at low pay.

The plan worked: I'm now employed as an underpaid helpdesk-monkey, have had the same job for the best part of a decade, and could have it a decade still.

Humans are squishy and flexible. Computers are not good with this - the only way to even simulate soft-body physics is sheer computational brute force. It's nightmarishly complicated just trying to predict which shame a blob of liver is going to assume if you poke it in a certain place.

Even worse were the keyboards that appeared for a brief time with 'sleep' and 'power off' keys.

I don't use Excel much, my memory was off.

No, the right-angle line.

But what if the user needs to type the weird bent line on the key beneath escape?

Slashdot won't accept it, as it has no ASCII character any more and some sites still don't get the UTF-8 thing.

With SSDs you can't even hear the drive going - that activity light is more important than ever!

On Excel, scroll lock toggles the action of the arrow keys. With lock off, they move the selected cell one step at a time. With lock on, they move the view one page at a time. The second mode is useful if you work with truly huge spreadsheets.

There are a few such combinations.
Win-P switches dual display mode.
Win-D (Aka 'boss key' or 'teacher key') minimises all windows. A second use restores them.

It's also known as the 'agh-bring-me-back-my-game-I-just-grabbed-the-flag!' key.

This is more a preemptive measure. We used it on a larger scale to keep Nazi bombers away. It worked reasonably well - forced them to fly high, or risk hitting a cable and destroying their plane.

"What we need is a net gun that will disable drones without endangering people."

What you need is some string and a bunch of balloons.
  - A British Person.