#Remember when typewriters were a thing?**

> It has never had anything to do with the representations on the
> keyboard itself. It was all about disambiguate what you literally
> typed from what meta keys you pressed and held.

[![enter image description here][1]][1]

Notice that **everything** is in UPPERCASE, because the the very first typewriters ( telegraph teletypes ) did not have lowercase at all.

Also there were no <kbd>CTRL</kbd>, <kbd>ALT</kbd> *meta* keys then.

The reason that historically meta keys were always written as UPPERCASE is in the old days graphic/desktop publishing pre-90's. It was the way books and ASCII text based systems distinguished a special KEY from text that you actually typed in. And they would usually be surrounded by brackets as `[CTRL]`,`[SHIFT]`, `[ALT]`, `[LSHIFT]` and so on.

Also you usually represent the individual keys with UPPERCASE to help distiguish an `I` from `l` or `1` in older systems because the fonts were terrible at the time. If you wanted to someone to actually type an UPPERCASE character you documented it as <kbd>SHIFT</kbd>+<kbd>L</kbd> or <kbd>SHIFT</kbd>+<kbd>I</kbd> or <kbd>SHIFT</kbd>+<kbd>A</kbd> because if you look at the keyboard keys themselves they have been in UPPERCASE for decades just for this reason. 

So look at some printed manuals/documentation, it was a thing one, and you will quickly see why the proper way to indicate something would be `[CTRL] + [ALT] + [DEL]` from the `DOS` era and **not** what the keyboard actually had, because all the keycaps representations varied.

If you do not think people are this thick headed just read [Where is the <kbd>ANY</kbd> key?](https://slashdot.org/story/03/09/21/1344243/where-is-the-any-key) stories.

So <kbd>CTRL</kbd> is how the documentation for the `<kbd/>` tag is represented in the markdown documentation.

And the most mass produced computer in the world and what my generation learned to program on out of Compute! and Compute Gazette magazines decades ago can not be left out.

[![enter image description here][2]][2]


  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/lgEkY.jpg
  [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/0U0yN.jpg