I think those symbols were so underutilized, IBM didn't care about cementing their names. It's an ambiguous triangle. Use it as delta. Use it as a house. It doesn't matter because the programmers are the ones that give it true purpose.

This was a fantastic article. The ASCII art alone is worth a click.

What I remember from my experiences with terminals and printers (the only display devices available at the time) from 1978-1980 was that the 0x7F <DEL> character rendered as a checkered box. This correlates with (0xFF) Figure 5 in the article. This was common among all printers I worked with, Teletype, Epson, Okidata, TI, Printronix, and even IBM. Also all the Lear Siegler, Televideo, DEC, Hazeltine, terminals I used did something similar. Even the character ROMs in my Ferguson Big Board II, and Kaypro II used the same checkered box pattern.

It's a reference to Murnau's "Nosferatu" where a letter from Orlok is written in a strange ideographic language that includes a picture of a house, evidently relating Orlok's request to buy a house.

Having been involved in some big projects my first instinct is that someone had to make a decision fast. IIRC the PC was designed in an 18-month skunkworks project.

I assume that someone had to meet a deadline, they were probably responsible for half a dozen other more important features, and there was a bleary-eyed team meeting where Chet asked “Any idea better than Dave’s house thing?” A bunch of people disagreed, no one had a markedly better idea than house thing, and it was memorialized with no one in the room remotely comprehending it would affect billions of PCs for the next 40 years.

> There is just one thing I cant't quite comprehend. Let's assume for a second that DEL was supposed to be delta. Did IBM seriously not try different ways of drawing a delta, before settling on the house glyph? With a little bit of effort, it is completely possible to draw a convincing delta, even in 8×8 pixel space.

But exactly the same argument applies to the Greek fonts where something that looks even more like a house is unmistakably intended to be delta, since it sits between gamma and epsilon. They could have made that looks like a triangle, but didn't.

Is there no one left to ask?

because they couldn't fit a large house into 8x16.

The line drawing characters were serious business. Because I love mazes. Though they were most often mis-used as menu borders. Novell achieved world domination with line drawing characters.

Wow, the “drj-mmc.ans” is absolutely impressive. At first I thought they applied some high-resolution mask but it really is just code page 437 text.

That immediately brings back memories (or more feelings) of playing [0]. It was, for a while, the only game my father had installed on his luggable, so I played it a lot as a small kid. I also think a did learn a lot of English from it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Adventure