Matthias Drochner <drochner@zel459.zel.kfa-juelich.de> writes:

> jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU said:
> > It would be really cool if NetBSD's bootblock treated left-shift as a
> > `keypress', and stopped the autoboot timer if it detected a keypress.
> > Is that doable? 
> 
> Kind of hard because the bootblocks get cooked characters from
> the BIOS. And what about serial consoles?
> (I prefer the space bar. It's easier to hit anyway:-)

There are BIOS calls to probe the shift state.  (What do you think
LILO does??)