Interesting keys

So the German keyboard has a few extra keys. Noteably Ö, Ä, Ü, ß, and €. But there are some other unusual ones that make me wonder what early typists/programmers were doing. We have shift access to the degree symbol ° (where the tilde would normally be), CTRL+ALT+2 (or 3) gives ² and ³. Shift 3 doesn't give you the pound sign, it gives you the paragraph sign: §. And this is the one I think is the most interesting. CTRL+ALT+m gives... µ.

 

When my dad was in school working on his chemistry degree, he had to learn either German or Russian because all of the important scientific research was done in Germany and Russia. I wonder if that led to this odd keyboard requirement. Overall, it's a real pain because a bunch of the other keys are in different locations compared to a US keyboard to accomodate this. I spent most of my day hitting backspace.