Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side

Various old computers had their keyboards adorned with unique symbols. Companies like Commodore, Atari, Amiga, or even – in its previous life – Apple chose to put their company logos on keys, and there were other weird and obscure keys on weird and obscure keyboards. But it was Apple’s recent push to move their American keyboards closer to European ones by embracing more iconography, that made me think of forgotten key symbols less obscure, ones that belonged to platforms we still use today. Even on a Mac and a PC, some key symbols didn’t make it to modern times. So let’s start with the PC side today since that part of the story begins earlier, and do Macs in a follow-up post. For a lot of 20th century, a battle has been waging between words and icons. The first salvo was, perhaps, the traffic signs: America embraced words, while Europe relied more on iconography. (As much as it looks like it, it wasn’t just “graphic design vs. not”; as a more varied continent with multiple languages,…