The PC keyboard symbols we lost to time
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
Old PC keyboards once used dozens of pictographic symbols for functions like Print Screen, Insert, and Delete, many inspired by proofreader marks. As office users rejected confusing icons, only four survived: Shift, Enter, Tab, and Backspace. The author traces this history and notes that some symbols, like ⎀ and ⎃, still exist in Unicode.
For a lot of 20th century, a battle has been waging between words and icons.
- Findecanor
Reverse Tab ⇤ is still with us, above the Tab ⇥ symbol. It is at the top to indicate that it is generated while holding Shift.
Many people have got the misconception that both symbols together is the Tab symbol, though. There is even a symbol consisting of both close together in Unicode: ⭾ and many PC keyboards that similarly have both arrows closer together than on keys with printed symbols generated with and without holding Shift.
(Apple has been printing only ⇥ though)
- VCFundedGenYer
Insert and Print Screen are not gone. Every one of my keyboards (with the exception of Macbooks) has Insert.
Meanwhile, Print Screen is very much a staple of Windows and Linux screenshotting.
Reverse Tab is kind of still around, just as Shift Tab and Ctrl Tab.
I don't know what the author was thinking when they wrote that.
- CalRobert
Insert is gone? I have it here... though I can't remember the last time I used it. I never found much reason to think "I want to overwrite existing text as I type"
- mattjoyce
I live these types of posts. Everything is always changing. For keyboards ist keys, symbols and layouts. Who can imagine not having several modifiers and just not knowing how and when to use them.
I particularly enjoyed learning the origin of the symbols, for shift, enter tab and backspace and how they survived as text replaced their siblings. I wish we could have symbols for therefore and approximatly.
As someone who has designed and built a few keyboards, this was fascinating.
- spijdar
Not really relevant to keyboard symbols, and not PC symbols, and it's not really lost to time, but does anyone know where the Ethernet symbol used on Apple products (and ... Android???) comes from? You know, the <...> symbol.
It's most prominently seen and probably associated with Apple products, going back to the first Macs with Ethernet (the Quadra 700/900). It's also used, bizarrely IMO, as the Android Ethernet symbol.
However, I've also seen it on one other type of computer -- Sun/SPARC systems. And on those systems (1990+), it predates the Apple usage on the Quadra (1991+), with at least my IPC having the <...> symbol for Ethernet over the AUI port. (not sure if Apple's NuBus NICs had it or not). Further, it's used on some of my RDI SPARC systems, with a different font.
Someone had to decide to use this symbol first, and I've always wanted to know who. It's distinct from the "iconography" that everyone else uses for Ethernet, and has survived to this day in its weird little Apple (and Android??) branch.