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

38 points zdw 22 hours ago 20 comments

gus_massa 1 hour ago | parent

> 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 45 minutes ago | parent

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

fasola 38 minutes ago | parent

??? This isn’t on the linked page.

DroneBetter 1 hour ago | parent

> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard

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

applfanboysbgon 21 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

Cockbrand 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

spijdar 38 minutes ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

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

roldie 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

Cockbrand 37 minutes ago | parent

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

Findecanor 6 minutes ago | parent

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 26 minutes ago | parent

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?

applfanboysbgon 17 minutes ago | parent

ASCII is a 7-bit encoding, so adding more symbols to it would rather defeat the point.

Once you already had that encoding established, in a time of 8-bit computing for which it had a practical purpose, it's historical momentum and inertia from there. Sure, we have Unicode now, but getting the entire industry to settle on including a sparkle emoji and a fire emoji on keyboard layouts is probably not going to happen.

kevin_thibedeau 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

II2II 9 minutes ago | parent

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.)

Sardtok 23 minutes ago | parent

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 13 minutes ago | parent

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

xnx 12 minutes ago | parent

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

II2II 2 minutes ago | parent

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.