Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side

zzdw about 23 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on unsung.aresluna.org

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DroneBetter•about 2 hours ago

> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard

is a particularly humorous instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

stuart78•28 minutes ago

From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.

amelius•about 1 hour ago

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.

spijdar•about 1 hour ago

Having seen laptops with dedicated copy/paste/undo/redo keys, I think Apple can be forgiven for not going down the function key rabbit hole: https://pomelo.shockfox.net/pub/img/powerlite.jpg

(Yes, they could have just replaced the "regular" function keys with copy/paste keys, but I feel like that would have gone over about as well as the various times they've, uh, tried to replace the function keys)

amelius•about 1 hour ago

The least they could have done was print "Copy", "Paste", etc. on the keys that we now use for those tasks.

Cockbrand•about 1 hour ago

The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii for a photo.

Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.

roldie•34 minutes ago

The lack of delete has always annoyed me (and still does). I hate that I have to press fn backspace, or cursor to the end of the word.

Sardtok•about 1 hour ago

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.

fasola•42 minutes ago

Enter appropriated the same “arrow returning” symbol long ago, and the key is colloquially known more often as Enter these days.

II2II•31 minutes ago

I'm wondering where those Canadian keyboards are used. I live in Canada, have seen plenty of multilingual keyboards, and have seen those symbols perhaps once. Even so I can't be sure it was on a keyboard. I just recognized one of the symbols.

bawolff•24 minutes ago

I suspect its Quebec only

xnx•41 minutes ago

2008 song about the Apple key by Hot Lava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts3tLs6xB1U

gus_massa•about 2 hours ago

> You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]

Did the editor repace :) with [happy-face]?

Cockbrand•about 1 hour ago

The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.

bawolff•21 minutes ago

I recall seeing that on typewriters when i was a kid (in the 90s). I dont know if i ever saw it on a computer keyboard.

Findecanor•35 minutes ago

The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.

behnamoh•about 1 hour ago

I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:

    ~!@#$%^&*()_+

And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why these symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?

Findecanor•22 minutes ago

Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph). German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.

Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.

II2II•38 minutes ago

ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.

(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)

kevin_thibedeau•44 minutes ago

ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.