Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side

Posted by zdw 1 day ago

Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side(unsung.aresluna.org)

101 points | 51 commentspage 2

wa2flq 5 hours ago|

All this micro-management of these standards only serves to confuse people and ultimately causes entry errors and wastes time. Go find the relevant XKCD comic on your own.

I personally miss the Plato IV Plasma Terminal Keyboard - https://codex.retro1.org/plato:tutor:plato_keyboard and http://xahlee.info/kbd/plato_iv_keyboard.html . Those keys on the right with represented many common functions. But the entire keyboard was designed for a future where computers would facilitate many worlds, not just a replacement for a typewriter or calculator.

Cockbrand 7 hours ago||

The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.

Findecanor 6 hours ago||

The symbols are from a weird ISO/IEC standard (9995-7 ?) that never really caught on except in a few places. I have seen the lock-key symbols more often on lock light panels than on keycaps.

bawolff 6 hours ago||

I recall seeing that on typewriters when i was a kid (in the 90s). I dont know if i ever saw it on a computer keyboard.

gus_massa 8 hours ago||

> You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: [happy-face] or [sad-face]

Did the editor repace :) with [happy-face]?

fasola 7 hours ago||

??? This isn’t on the linked page.

gus_massa 1 hour ago||

Wrong thread. The correct one is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767371

Cockbrand 7 hours ago||

Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?

reaperducer 4 hours ago||

I enjoyed the post, but it always bothers me when tech people don't know the difference between Return and Enter.

Panic, for example, gets this right. In Transmit, pressing Return connects to a server. Pressing Enter enters rename mode.

behnamoh 7 hours ago|

I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:

    ~!@#$%^&*()_+

And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why these symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?

Findecanor 6 hours ago||

Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph). German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.

Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.

II2II 6 hours ago|||

ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.

(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)

kevin_thibedeau 7 hours ago|||

ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.

kps 5 hours ago|||

>And every programming language uses a subset of these.

You might like https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode