Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side

Part 1 of a historical survey of forgotten keyboard symbols focuses on the PC side. It begins with old computers whose keyboards carried unique symbols, including company logos on keys from Commodore, Atari, Amiga, and Apple in its previous life, plus other weird and obscure keys. The author was prompted by Apple’s recent push to move American keyboards closer to European ones by embracing more iconography, which made these forgotten symbols—even ones from platforms still in use—seem less obscure. Some key symbols from Mac and PC never made it to modern times, and this post covers PCs first because that story begins earlier, with Macs planned for a follow-up.

The article frames the 20th century as a battle between words and icons. Traffic signs are cited as an early example: America embraced words while Europe relied more on iconography, not merely because of graphic design preference, but because Europe is more varied and multilingual and needed a universal visual language for travelers. That trickled down to home electronics and computers, where iconography helped companies make one product for all of Europe without many SKUs carrying different UI strings.

Examples include IBM’s 1970s Selectric typewriter, shown in American and European editions; the European edition used Express, a very fast Backspace, and Index, which moved the page down—both prototypes of future arrow keys. IBM’s early 1130 computer from 1965 had an unusual symbol for space. Some IBM laboratory and scientific computers in the 1970s and even 1980s leaned further into iconography, but text eventually won as office PC users rejected confusing symbols. As keyboards became today’s PC/Windows keyboards, only four symbols remained and gained broad acceptance: ⇧ for Shift, ↵ for Enter, ⇥ for Tab, and an arrow for Backspace.

The post then catalogs old symbols: Print Screen depicted an old CRT screen turning into a piece of paper, and a key beep symbol was popular during the transition from loud typewriters to quieter keyboards. On the front edge of the forgotten Reverse Tab was Home, which historically meant returning to the top-left corner of the screen and sometimes clearing the screen. The author’s favorites include Insert (now gone) and Delete (still present), which appear inspired by proofreader marks. Related symbols covered invert/reverse video, blinking, and underline, plus a “beauty” likely meaning delete word. Some of these survive in Unicode: the author spotted at least ⎀, ⎃, ⎁, and ⎂, with the last two representing contiguous and non-contiguous underline.