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

(unsung.aresluna.org)

35 points | by zdw 22 hours ago

6 comments

  • Sardtok 5 minutes 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.
  • DroneBetter 51 minutes ago
    > There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard

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

    • applfanboysbgon 3 minutes ago
      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.
  • amelius 32 minutes 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 19 minutes 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 14 minutes ago
        The least they could have done was print "Copy", "Paste", etc. on the keys that we now use for those tasks.
    • Cockbrand 21 minutes 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.

  • gus_massa 1 hour 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 27 minutes ago
      Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?
    • fasola 19 minutes ago
      ??? This isn’t on the linked page.
  • Cockbrand 19 minutes ago
    The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.
  • behnamoh 8 minutes 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?