These symbols are everywhere, on your phone, in your car entertainment system, on your dad’s laptop, in your mom’s music player, but have you ever wondered what do they really mean? Or what makes them so instantly recognisable? Or why were they picked to denote a form of technology in the first place! Sure, there is an explanation. Find out as Kumar Saurav digs out the origin stories of the iconic tech symbols
Bluetooth: The Bluetooth logo, the portion in white, are the initials of King Harald Bluetooth as written in Scandinavian runes. When a team of various companies were working together to come-up with a low-power short-range radio connectivity, now called the Bluetooth, an intel engineer who was working as a cross-corporate mediator, Jim Kardach, suggested the name Bluetooth. He was reading a book on Harald Bluetooth, the tenth century Viking king of. Bluetooth was hailed as a uniter as he was instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what are now Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Because the purpose of the Bluetooth technology was to connect and unite just in the manner that the tenth century king did, everyone approved of the recommendation.
Command: If you have used an Apple MacBook, you must would have have come across this Command key. When the Mac’s menu was being designed, the development team opted for the old Apple key as the logo for the command function key, to which Steve Jobs sternly objected as he felt that the company’s logo was being overused. He wanted a fresh logo. The team’s bitmap artist Susan Kare in order to obtain a new logo was flipping through the pages of a symbol dictionary when she stumbled upon this cloverleaf-like symbol, which is used as the official road sign for tourist attractions. Kare suggested this logo to the team, and it became the symbol of the 1984 Macintosh command key.
Pause: The origin of the favourite button on the remote was the toughest to locate, but we have managed find a few reigning theories that point in the said direction. While some believe that the two vertical lines originated from the Japanese character 'ij' which indicates a pause, or from the letter 'U' with the bottom part cut off, the most acceptable theory is that the pause sign originated from caesura, a symbol which is used in poetry and musical compositions to mark a complete pause. It usually looks like this: II but is often slanted in this // fashion. The use of caesura was widespread in Latin and Greek poerty, and Old English verses. The symbol is also popular as 'tram-lines' in the UK and 'railroad tracks' in the US. The pause button first appeared on the electronic devices in the Sixties.
Play: The triangle pointing forward in the play button signifies the direction in which the tape is rolling. In the tape recorders, in which the cassettes were inserted upside-down, the triangle would point left. You might not be able to relate to the magnetic tapes or the tapes rolling left or right as your generation never played music on tapes, but you should ask your parents to explain to you the functioning of the cassettes on which they grew up. As far as the origin of the play button, which is still in use on keyboards, media players or other devices, is concerned, there is no definitive answer. Some say that the symbol, which first appeared in 1960s, is inspired by an arrow. The fast forward and the reverse button were indeed inspired by the play button.
@: Even though there are various theories about its historic use in Latin culture (the first documented use of @ was in 1536), @ was a rarely used key on the keyboard in the modern era. However, its fate changed when the emails and Twitter arrived and made it ‘THE’ symbol of the techvolution period. In France and Italy, it’s called the snail, in China the little mouse and the monkey’s tail in Germany. Historically, it’s believed that @ was first used by merchant as a short form for ‘each at’ (apples @ `10). Some say that it was used by medieval monks as an abbreviation of the Latin word AD to save space and ink while copying manuscripts. In modern era, it was first used by Raymond Tomlinson in 1971 to separate the user from the terminal.
Power button: When your parents were growing up, the switches had a lever that could be pushed up or pulled down to switch on or switch off an electronic device. Then came the switches with on and off markings which are even popular today. However, when the devices started to become smart and it was left to the device to decide whether you want to switch on or switch off the device, the modern power button arrived. Apart from the versions of the switches that we have discuss, there was a set of switches that had binary markings - 1 for on and 0 for off. The new power button is actually inspired by these. The straight line is 1 and the incomplete circle is 0. The two are combined to form one logo.
USB: The logo was created as a part of the USB 1.0 spec in 1995. There is no definite answer to who designed the USB logo and what was the idea behind it but it’s said that the logo is inspired by the trident of Neptune, a comic character. While the trident symbolises power and authority, the USB logo stands for technological power that one derives from connecting to multiple devices. The triangle, square and circle at the tip of the three-pronged spear denote that various types of peripherals can be attached through this device. It also signifies the relevance of living in an interconnected world that has been made possible because of technological innovations like USB.
Ethernet: There is a confusion over who designed the Ethernet port symbol. Even though the popular belief is that David Hill of IBM designed the it, there is also a debate over the early sketches of Ethernet drawn by Bob Metcalfe presumably in the mid 1970s while he was at Xerox PARC. You can go through the said images online, and decide for yourself if the in-use logo of Ethernet is inspired by that or not. Although Hill says nothing about being inspired from the Metcalfe sketches, he opines that the symbol depicts the various local area network connections available at the time at one place. The array of blocks each represent computers or terminals.