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.

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.

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.

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