Keyboards used to be strange

Commodore, Atari, Amiga and an earlier Apple all stamped their logos onto keys, alongside a pile of keys that made sense only on that one machine.

Words versus pictures

A twentieth century fight ran through traffic signs first. America wrote the instruction out, Europe drew it.

“For a lot of 20th century, a battle has been waging between words and icons.”

One product, every country

Icons were cheaper for Europe. Draw the function instead of naming it and you ship one keyboard across a dozen languages rather than a dozen SKUs.

Express and Index

IBM's 1970s Selectric had a European edition with two keys we never got. Express was a very fast Backspace, Index moved the page down. Both were arrow keys before arrow keys.

Only four made it

IBM's lab machines leaned hard into symbols through the 70s and 80s. Office buyers found them confusing, so the PC keyboard kept just Shift, Enter, Tab and a Backspace arrow.

“eventually lost to text as office PC users rejected the confusing symbols”

A screen becoming paper

Print Screen was drawn as a CRT turning into a sheet. There was also a key beep symbol, from the years when people moving off loud typewriters missed the noise.

Proofreader marks, still in Unicode

The old Insert and Delete symbols borrow from proofreading marks. Several of them survive as characters nobody types: ⎀, ⎃, ⎁ and ⎂.

“These seem inspired by proofreader marks, which feels wonderfully old-time'y”