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

Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side(unsung.aresluna.org)

67 points by zdw 1 day ago | 34 comments

> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard

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

I don't think I've ever seen someone do this from both sides of the same abbreviation (eg. Automated ATM Machine) before now, that's quite amusing.

cesaref 44 minutes ago |

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.

amelius 2 hours 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.

leoc 1 hour ago | |

I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.

kps 43 minutes ago | | |

> […] left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row.

The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. This derives from Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with the left-side keyset paired with the right-side mouse.

Cockbrand 2 hours 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.

kps 1 hour ago | | |

The Extended Keyboard not-II had the words printed below they keys. https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Apple_M0115_top.jpg

spijdar 2 hours 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 2 hours ago | | |

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

roldie 1 hour 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.

dchest 38 minutes ago | | |

You can also use Emacs keys (Ctrl-D) for one-handed delete. Very convenient when Caps Lock is remapped to Control.

Sardtok 2 hours 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 2 hours ago | |

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

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago |

On the JIS 2003 model, the more traditional Control position is great (it’s how I map my boards) but the Caps Lock positioning is really good too and makes so much sense with how infrequently it’s used. Very little risk of accidentally hitting it. I wonder why more boards haven’t adopted it.

stuart78 1 hour 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.

II2II 1 hour 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.

kps 59 minutes ago | |

Québec and federal governments.

bawolff 1 hour ago | |

I suspect its Quebec only

bhouston 1 hour ago |

I think the increased use of symbols was because both Europe and Canada are multilingual m, right?

pell 43 minutes ago | |

Europe is also a little off here. Different countries use different layouts across Europe.

wa2flq 56 minutes ago |

All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.

I personally miss the Plato IV Plasma Terminal Keyboard - https://codex.retro1.org/plato:tutor:plato_keyboard and http://xahlee.info/kbd/plato_iv_keyboard.html . Those keys on the right with represented many common functions. But the entire keyboard was designed for a future where computers would facilitate many worlds, not just a replacement for a typewriter or calculator.

xnx 2 hours ago |

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

Cockbrand 2 hours ago |

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

Findecanor 1 hour 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.

bawolff 1 hour 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.

gus_massa 3 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 2 hours ago | |

Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?

fasola 2 hours ago | |

??? This isn’t on the linked page.

behnamoh 2 hours 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?

II2II 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

Findecanor 1 hour 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.

kps 54 minutes ago | |

>And every programming language uses a subset of these.

You might like https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode