Thegeeknotes.com

They are road signs for your daily rituals – the instantly recognized

symbols and icons you press, click and ogle countless times a day when

you interact with your computer. But how much do you know about their

origins & Story behind these most popular computer symbols?

Ethernet

According to Hill, the symbol was part of a set of symbols that were all

meant to depict the various local area network connections available at

the time. The array of blocks, which are purposefully non-hierarchical,

each represent computers/terminals.

Despite being “invented” many years prior, the thing we now recognize as

the Ethernet port symbol was actually designed by IBM’s David Hill.

SBBOD

This terror is known by many names: the pinwheel of death, the spinning pizza,

the hypnowheel of doom, the SBBOD (spinning beach ball of death).

Apple officially calls it “spinning wait cursor,” but most Mac users

hail it with a simple expletive. It first appeared in Apple’s OSX and

continues to indicate that an application is not responding to system

events. As many have noted, the SBBOD is actually an evolution of the

wristwatch “wait” cursor that the company first used in early versions

of the Mac OS. While its design origins remain mysterious, Apple likely

dropped the watch as it reminded users of the time passing as the

program remained perpetually hung up. Despite this, the modern iteration

has proved only one thing though: It’s entirely possible to despise a

pretty, hypnotic spinning wheel.

FireWire

Back in 1995, a small group at Apple – the main developer of FireWire –

set about designing a symbol that could accurately reflect the new

technology they were working on. Initially, the symbol was red, but was later altered to

yellow for unknown reasons. Originally intended as serial

alternative to SCSI, FireWire’s main allure was that it promised

high-speed connectivity for digital audio and video equipment. So

designers opted for a symbol with three prongs, representing data,

audio and video.

At

Ah @, the only symbol on the list to earn a spot in the MoMa’s

architecture and design collection. How has this fetishized symbol

become so potent over the years? It probably has something to do with

the net-ruling rune’s deep and mysterious origins. It has been known by

many names: the little mouse (China), the snail (France and Italy), the

monkey’s tail (Germany). In 1971, a Bolt, Beranek & Newman programmer Raymond Tomlinson decided to insert the symbol between computer network addresses to separate the user from the terminal. Prior to Tomlinson’s use, the @ also graced the keyboard of

the American Underwood in 1885 as an accounting shorthand symbol meaning

“at the rate of.” Go back even further and things start to get hazy.

Some suggest that @ has its origins in the sixth century, when monks

adopted it as a better way of writing the word ad-Latin for “at” or

“toward”-that was not so easily confused with A.D., the designation for

Anno Domini, or the the years after the death of Christ.

Sleep

People were confused by “the standby state.” It seemed counter-intuitive

for an electronic device to be neither on nor off. So, after the IEEE

nicked the ICE’s standby button, it decided some rechristening was in order. The governing body renamed standby mode “sleep,” to invoke the state where humans are neither on nor off. Today, a crescent moon is the de facto sleep state symbol on devices in the United  States and Europe. Its metaphorical power is undeniable! Travel

to Japan, though, and you’ll probably see the occasional Zzzz button.

Pause

As far as the pause symbol goes, many have noted it resembles the

notation for an open connection on an electrical schematic. Some say it

is simply a stop symbol with a chunk carved out of its center. We’d put

our money on a more classical origin: In musical notation, the caesura

indicates a – wait for it – pause.

Play

While the Play/Pause symbols aren’t native to computers, they’ve made

their way onto keyboards, media players (real and virtual), and every

other device capable of playing audio or video. Unfortunately, neither

the right-pointing triangle nor the double pause bars seem to have a

definitive origin. They first appeared as tape transport symbols on

reel-to-reel tape decks during the mid-1960s. In some cases, they were

accompanied by the (double triangle) rewind and fast forward symbols.

The direction of the play arrow indicated the direction the tape would

move. Easy.

USB

Created as part of the USB 1.0 spec, the USB icon was drawn to resemble

Neptune’s Trident, the mighty Dreizack. (But that doesn’t mean you

should go around stabbing people or trying to domesticate dolphins with

your flash drive.) In lieu of the pointed triangles at the tip of the

three-pronged spear, the USB promoters decided to alter the shapes to a

triangle, square and circle. This was done to signify all the different

peripherals that could be attached using the standard.

Bluetooth

You’ve probably heard the story of 10th-century Danish King, Harald

Blåtand, as it relates to Bluetooth, right? He was renowned connoisseur

of blueberries; at least one of this teeth was permanently stained blue;

yadda yadda yadda. What you might not know is that the Bluetooth symbol

is actually a combination of the two runes that represent Harald’s

initials. It just so happens the first Bluetooth receptor also had a

“teeth-like” shape, and was – you guessed it – blue. But the symbolic

interplay doesn’t end there. As the Bluetooth SIG notes, Blåtand “was

instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what are now

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark – just as Bluetooth technology is designed

to allow collaboration between differing industries such as the

computing, mobile phone and automotive markets.”

Command

What do Swedish campgrounds and overuse of the Apple logo have in common? A lot, according to Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac development team. While working with other team members to translate menu commands directly to the keyboard,

Hertzfeld and his team decided to add a special function key. The idea

was simple: When pressed in combination with other keys, this “Apple

key” would select the corresponding menu command. Jobs hated it – or

more precisely the symbol used to represent the button – which was yet

another picture of the Apple logo. Hertzfeld recalls his reaction:

“There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking

the Apple logo in vain!” A hasty redesign followed, in which bitmap

artist Susan Kare pored through an international symbol dictionary and

settled on one floral symbol that, in Sweden, indicated a noteworthy

attraction in a campground. Alternately known as the Gorgon loop, the

splat, the infinite loop, and, in the Unicode standard, a “place of

interest sign,” the command symbol has remained a mainstay on Apple

keyboards to this day.

Power

It’s plastered on T-shirts it tells you which button will start your Prius. As far back back as World War II engineers used the binary system to label individual power buttons, toggles and rotary switches: A 1 meant “on,” and a 0 meant off. In 1973, the International Electro technical Commission vaguely codified a broken circle with a line inside it as

“standby power state,” and sticks to that story even now. The Institute

of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too

vague, and altered the definition to simply mean power. Hell yeah, IEEE.

Way to take a stand.