Marcin Wichary documents forgotten keyboard symbols across PC and Mac history
Designer and typographer publishes two-part essay tracing the evolution and disappearance of iconic key symbols on personal computers.
What to know
- Wichary documents how European and North American keyboard design diverged, with Europe favoring iconography for its multilingual populations while the U.S. preferred text labels.
- Modern Windows keyboards retained only four iconic symbols (Shift, Enter, Tab, Backspace arrow) from a much richer visual language used in 1960s-80s IBM computers, which users found confusing.
- Apple created region-specific Mac keyboard variants—including a unique Canadian edition from the late 1990s with government-mandated symbols—most of which are now obsolete but preserved in Unicode.
- The Canadian and Japanese Mac keyboards featured distinct symbols for keys like Control and Escape that were never adopted widely and vanished from subsequent Apple designs.
Marcin Wichary Designer, typographer, and author
How it unfolded 4 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Wichary publishes second essay on Mac keyboard symbol variants
The second part of Wichary's essay examines Apple's Mac keyboards across regional variants. It covers the famous beige PowerBooks for Germany, a unique Canadian variant from the late 1990s-early 2000s with distinct symbols for Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock, and Esc, and Japanese JIS keyboards with a pencil symbol on the Control key—all of which are now obsolete but preserved in Unicode.
“I imagine the government exerted some pressure and Apple relented, creating a unique set of keyboards with some really ugly icons.”
— Marcin Wichary -
first by HN Frontpage, 6d ago
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I never understood people complaining about "ATM machine": I mean, I get it. Everybody knows what an ATM is and we know it's a machine, so it is redundant.But if I didn't have a japanese keyboard and family living in Japan since 30 years, I wouldn't necessarily know what:"There was also the JIS keyboard"would refer to.While: "There was also the…
2 more of the top 3 · 13 posts in this stretch
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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…
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I gonna be generous and guess this was upvoted as top post for being maybe possibly midwit-correct, hoho you are so right good sire, reddit-fedora-tip herpdy-derp.But it would not at all be incorrect in American English to say something was "ANSI Standard". Because everyone with more than a few braincells knows the American National Standards…
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Wichary announces second essay, notes extensive research into white keyboards
Wichary shares the second part of his essay on Mastodon, humorously noting that he purchased and photographed Apple's white keyboards in precise detail to document the regional symbol variants.
“In the second part that just went out, I focused on the Mac, and bought all the white keyboards and took precise photos of them, which was *totally* not necessary…”
— mwichary@mastodon.online, Author · source -
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In the second part that just went out, I focused on the Mac, and bought all the white keyboards and took precise photos of them, which was *totally* not necessary: https:// unsung.aresluna.org/key-symbol s-we-lost-to-time-pt-2-the-mac-side/
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Wichary shares essay on Mastodon, highlights Insert and Delete symbols
Wichary announces the first part of his essay on Mastodon, drawing particular attention to the proofreading-inspired symbols used for Insert, Delete, and other keys in PC keyboard history.
“I wrote recently about some keyboard symbols that were lost to time! The first part has the PC side, and the absolutely beautiful, proofreading-inspired symbols for Insert, Delete, and other things…”
— mwichary@mastodon.online -
M
I wrote recently about some keyboard symbols that were lost to time! The first part has the PC side, and the absolutely beautiful, proofreading-inspired symbols for Insert, Delete, and other things: https:// unsung.aresluna.org/key-symbol s-we-lost-to-time-pt-1-the-pc-side/
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- 4 days quiet
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Wichary publishes essay on PC keyboard symbol history
Marcin Wichary releases the first part of his essay documenting forgotten keyboard symbols, focusing on the PC side. The piece traces the history from IBM's Selectric typewriter in the 1970s through scientific computers that used iconography, to the eventual standardization of just four symbols (⇧, ↵, ⇥, and Backspace arrow) on modern Windows keyboards.
“Some IBM laboratory and scientific computers in the 1970s and even 1980s veered more into iconography, but eventually lost to text as office PC users rejected the confusing symbols.”
— Marcin Wichary
What people are saying 10 voices from 1 site · best of 15 · verbatim
- Sep 21
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The Copy/Paste thing is kinda funny.If you don't already know Cmd+C and Cmd+V, the keyboard gives you zero clue what they do.I get why Apple didn't add a bunch of extra keys though. At some point you'd just have a keyboard full of random buttons.Still, having a real Delete key on a MacBook would be pretty nice lol.
- Sep 20
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The Canadian keyboards are so Canada: supposed to appeal to either English or French users, but just pisses them off. English speakers go for the US layout, and French speakers go for a European layout.I remember some of our early Chromebooks had Canadian keyboards, and students and teachers revolted.
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I always find icons better than text, given that you don't know the exact linguistic background of the user. Thus for me the Canadian keyboard makes more sense than everything. I think the latest keyboards from Apple also go this direction, exchanging text for icons.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboardis a particularly humorous instance of