The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols [Computers]

They’re road signs on your daily rituals-the instantly recognized symbols and icons you press, click, and ogle countless times a day once you interact along with your computer. But how much are you aware about their origins?

Power

It’s plastered on T-shirts; it tells you which ones button will start your Prius; it’s even been used on NYC condom wrappers. As far back back as WWII engineers used the binary system to label individual power buttons, toggles and rotary switches: a 1 meant ” on,” and a zero meant off. In 1973, the International Electrotechnical Commission vaguely codified a broken circle with a line inside it as ” standby power state,” and sticks to that story even now. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too vague, and changed the definition simply to mean power. Hell yeah, IEEE. Method to take a stand.

Command

What do Swedish campgrounds and overuse of the Apple logo have in common? a good deal, in line with Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac development team. While working with other team members to translate menu commands directly to the keyboard, Hertzfeld and his team decided to add a different function key. The premise was simple: When pressed in combination with other keys, this ” Apple key” would select the corresponding menu command. Jobs hated it-or more precisely the emblem used to represent the button-which was an extra picture of the Apple logo. Hertzfeld recalls his reaction: ” There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain!” A hasty redesign followed, within which bitmap artist Susan Kare poured through in international symbol dictionary and settled on one floral symbol that in Sweden, indicated a noteworthy attraction in a campground. Alternately often known as the Gorgon loop, the splat, the infinite loop, and, inside the Unicode standard, a ” place of interest sign,” the command symbol has remained a mainstay on Apple keyboards to this present day.

Bluetooth

You’ve probably heard the story of 10th Century Danish King, Harald Blåtand, as it relates to Bluetooth, right? He was renowned connoisseur of blueberries; not less than one of this teeth was permanently stained blue; yadda yadda yadda. What you would possibly not know is that the Bluetooth symbol is really a mixture of the two runes that represent Harald’s initials. It simply so happens the first Bluetooth receptor also had a ” teeth-like” shape, and was-you guessed it-blue. But the symbolic interplay doesn’t end there. As the Bluetooth SIG notes, Blåtand ” was instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark – just as Bluetooth technology is designed to allow collaboration between differing industries along with the computing, cellphone, and automotive markets.”

USB

Created as section of the USB 1.0 spec, the USB icon was interested in resemble Neptune’s Trident, the mighty Dreizack. (But that doesn’t mean you have to go around stabbing people or seeking to domesticate dolphins along with your flash drive.) In lieu of the pointed triangles at the end of the three-pronged spear, the USB Promoters decided to vary the shapes to a triangle, square and circle. This was done to indicate each of the different peripherals which may be attached using the typical.
 

Play

While the Play/Pause symbols aren’t native to computers, they’ve made their way onto keyboards, media players (real and virtual), and every other device capable of playing audio or video. Unfortunately, neither definitely the right-pointing triangle nor the double pause bars seem to have a definitive origin. They first appeared as tape transport symbols on reel-to-reel tape decks in the course of the mid-1960s. At times, they were accompanied by the (double triangle) rewind and fast forward symbols. The direction of the play arrow indicated the direction the tape would move. Easy.

Pause

As far as the pause symbol goes, many have noted it resembles an the notation for an open connection on an electrical schematic. Some say it’s simply a stop symbol with a piece carved out of its center. We’d put our money on a more classical origin: In musical notation, the caesura indicates a-anticipate it-pause.

Sleep

People were confused by ” the standby state.” It seemed counter-intuitive for an electronic device to be neither on nor off. So, after the IEEE nicked the ICE’s standby button (remember?), it decided some rechristening was in order. The governing body re-named standby mode ” sleep,” to invoke the state where humans are neither on nor off. Today, a crescent moon is the de facto sleep state symbol on devices within the US and Europe. Its metaphorical power is undeniable! Travel to Japan, though, and you’ll probably see the occasional Zzzz button.

At

Ah @, the sole symbol on the list to earn a gap within the MoMa’s architecture and design collection. How has this fetishized symbol become so potent through the years? It probably has something to do with the web-ruling rune’s deep and mysterious origins. It has been known by many names: the snail (France and Italy), the little mouse (China), the monkey’s tail (Germany). In 1971, a Bolt, Beranek & Newman programmer Raymond Tomlinson decided to insert the emblem between computer network addresses to separate the user from the terminal. Ahead of Tomlinson’s use, the @ also graced the keyboard of the yank Underwood in 1885 as an accounting shorthand symbol meaning ” at the velocity of.” Go back even further and things start to get hazy. Some suggest that @ has its origins within the sixth century, when monks adopted it as an improved way of wirting the word ad-Latin for ” at” or ” toward” -that was not so easily confused with AD, the designation for Anno Domini, or the the years after the death of Christ.

Firewire

Back in 1995, a small group at Apple-the primary developer of FireWire-set about designing a logo which could accurately reflect the brand new technology they were working on. Originally intended as serial alternative to SCSI, FireWire’s main allure was that it promised high-speed connectivity for digital audio and video equipment. So designers opted for an emblem with three prongs, representing video, audio and information. Initially, the logo was red, but was later altered to yellow for unknown reasons.

SBBOD

This terror is legendary by many names: the hypnowheel of doom, the spinning pizza, the pinwheel of death, the SBBOD (spinning beach ball of death). Apple officially calls it ” spinning wait cursor,” but most Mac users hail it with an easy expletive. It first appeared in Apple’s OSX and continues to signify that an application is just not responding to system events. As many have noted, the SBBOD is really an evolution of the wristwatch ” wait” cursor that the company first used in early versions of the Mac OS. While its design origins remain mysterious, Apple likely dropped the watch as it reminded users of the time passing as the program remained perpetually hung up. Despite this, the trendy iteration has proved only 1 thing though: it’s entirely possible to despise a beautiful, hypnotic spinning wheel.

Ethernet

Despite being ” invented” a long time prior, the item we now recognize as the Ethernet port symbol was actually designed by IBM’s David Hill. In line with Hill, the logo was portion of a fixed of symbols that were all meant to depict the numerous local area network connections available at the time. The array of blocks, that are purposefully non-hierarchical, each represent computers/terminals. While Hill makes no specific mention of Bob Metcalfe’s earliest Ethernet sketches, it’s easy to look how the trendy symbol uses them for inspiration.

Original art by guest artist Chuck Anderson and contributing artist Sam Spratt.

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This post is tagged: computer, computers, histories, ing, Symbols