Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
a day ago
- Apple made a beige keyboard variant for Germany in the 1990s to comply with local color/contrast laws, similar to ThinkPads.
- The Canadian keyboard (CSA/ACNOR) from the late 1990s-2000s had unique symbols for keys like Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock, and Esc, differing from both US and European layouts.
- Canada's keyboard featured distinctive icons for middle keys, arrows, and Enter keys, making it icon-heavy compared to other variants.
- The Japanese JIS keyboard kept Control in a traditional position and introduced a unique pencil symbol on the Control key, linked to Apple's Kotoeri input system for Japanese text entry.
- Kotoeri allowed switching between katakana, hiragana, kanji, and Western scripts, and the pencil symbol appeared onscreen in typing menus, but was removed by 2014.
- Apple created these non-standard symbols under government pressure, despite finding them ugly, and they are now only in Unicode, not on modern keyboards.
- The Kotoeri pencil symbol recalls Apple's recent return to a similar concept with the Fn/globe key for emoji switching.