On IBM PC compatible personal computers from the 1980s, the BIOS allowed the user to hold down the Alt key and type a decimal number on … See more

The Alt codes had become so well known and memorized by users that Microsoft decided to preserve them in Microsoft Windows, even though the OS features a newer and different … See more

The Alt key method does not work on ChromeOS, macOS, Linux or other operating systems and there is no evidence of interest in replicating it. However, numeric entry of Unicode characters is possible in most Unix or Unix-like See more

• Combining character
• Compose key for other operating systems
• Keyboard layout
• List of Unicode characters
• Numeric character reference See more

Later versions of Windows and applications such as Microsoft Word supported Unicode. As Unicode included all the characters in the MSDOS code pages, this had the … See more

If Num lock is disabled, attempting an Alt code may cause unexpected results in some applications, due to the controls used on the same key. For example, Alt+4 can be taken as Alt+←, causing a web browser to go back one page. See more