The forgotten Mac keyboard symbols Canada forced Apple to make
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Canadian regulations led Apple to produce Mac keyboards with unique, often ugly icons for keys like Control, Alt, Tab, and even Escape. This CSA/ACNOR variant replaced the standard symbols used in US and European layouts, and appeared on models from the AppleDesign keyboard to the white 2003 keyboard. The article also explores the Japanese Kotoeri pencil symbol on the Control key, a short-lived Apple invention to aid complex Japanese input.
I can imagine the pain inside Apple of someone having to put the ugly symbols coming from above, alongside otherwise generally thoughtful and refined typography.
- DroneBetter
> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard
is a particularly humorous instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
- amelius
No amount of drooling over Apple keyboards will make me forget that Apple's designers didn't add keys for basic functions such as Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo.
- alentred
Very nice post, I love computer history and lore and this fits just right!
I would also add ZX Spectrum keyboard with all the keywords on it. G/GOTO, L/LET, P/PRINT etc. Was lots of fun.
We should have engraved common actions on the keys when we could, before every software invented its own set of keyboard shortcuts.
- Sardtok
Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.
- cesaref
I think back in the day (say the late 80s) it became apparent to those in charge that this new IT thing was going to be very important in the workplace, and that it was going to be important to train up people to operate computers.
Given those in charge were probably one finger typists if that, and befuddled by technology, they would collectively have decided that computers should be standardised so that learnt skills would be transferrable, and therefore they probably imposed ideas like standardised keyboard layouts.
Of course it turned out that the next generation were totally capable of operating computers without any formal training, were totally fine with different operating systems, different keyboard layouts, different applications etc, and so there was probably lots of wasted effort solving a non-existent problem.