Historias secretas de muchos símbolos utilizados en la Informática
Encontré este artículo muy interesante sobre el origen de distintos símbolos que utilizamos constantemente en nuestro trabajo con el PC y con Internet. Aunque está en inglés, es fácil de comprender y nos deja un sabor muy agradable en nuestros propósitos investigativos.
They are road signs for your daily rituals-the instantly recognized
symbols and icons you press, click, and ogle countless times a day when
you interact with your computer. But how much do you know about their
origins?
Power
It's plastered on T-shirts; it tells you which button will start your Prius; it's even been used on NYC condom wrappers.
As far back back as WWII engineers used the binary system to label
individual power buttons, toggles and rotary switches: a 1 meant "on,"
and a 0 meant off. In 1973, the International Electrotechnical
Commission vaguely codified a broken circle with a line inside it as
"standby power state," and sticks to that story even now. The Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too
vague, and altered the definition to simply mean power. Hell yeah, IEEE.
Way to take a stand.
Command
What do Swedish campgrounds
and overuse of the Apple logo have in common? A lot, according to Andy
Hertzfeld of the original Mac development team. While working with other
team members to translate menu commands directly to the keyboard,
Hertzfeld and his team decided to add a special function key. The idea
was simple: When pressed in combination with other keys, this "Apple
key" would select the corresponding menu command. Jobs hated it-or more
precisely the symbol used to represent the button-which was yet another
picture of the Apple logo. Hertzfeld recalls his reaction: "There are
too many Apples on the screen! It's ridiculous! We're taking the Apple
logo in vain!" A hasty redesign followed, in which bitmap artist Susan
Kare poured through in international symbol dictionary and settled on
one floral symbol that in Sweden, indicated a noteworthy attraction in a
campground. Alternately known as the Gorgon loop, the splat, the
infinite loop, and, in the Unicode standard, a "place of interest sign,"
the command symbol has remained a mainstay on Apple keyboards to this
day.
Bluetooth
You've probably heard the story of 10th Century Danish King, Harald
Blåtand, as it relates to Bluetooth, right? He was renowned connoisseur
of blueberries; at least one of this teeth was permanently stained blue;
yadda yadda yadda. What you might not know is that the Bluetooth symbol
is actually a combination of the two runes that represent Harald's
initials. It just so happens the first Bluetooth receptor also had a
"teeth-like" shape, and was-you guessed it-blue. But the symbolic
interplay doesn't end there. As the Bluetooth SIG notes, Blåtand "was
instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what are now
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark - just as Bluetooth technology is designed
to allow collaboration between differing industries such as the
computing, mobile phone, and automotive markets."
USB
Created as part of the USB 1.0 spec, the USB icon was drawn to
resemble Neptune's Trident, the mighty Dreizack. (But that doesn't mean
you should go around stabbing people or trying to domesticate dolphins
with your flash drive.) In lieu of the pointed triangles at the tip of
the three-pronged spear, the USB Promoters decided to alter the shapes
to a triangle, square and circle. This was done to signify all the
different peripherals that could be attached using the standard.
Play
While the Play/Pause symbols aren't native to computers, they've made
their way onto keyboards, media players (real and virtual), and every
other device capable of playing audio or video. Unfortunately, neither
the right-pointing triangle nor the double pause bars seem to have a
definitive origin. They first appeared as tape transport symbols on
reel-to-reel tape decks during the mid-1960s. In some cases, they were
accompanied by the (double triangle) rewind and fast forward symbols.
The direction of the play arrow indicated the direction the tape would
move. Easy.
Pause
As far as the pause symbol goes, many have noted it resembles an the
notation for an open connection on an electrical schematic. Some say it
is simply a stop symbol with a chunk carved out of its center. We'd put
our money on a more classical origin: In musical notation, the caesura indicates a-wait for it-pause.
Sleep
People were confused by "the standby state." It seemed
counter-intuitive for an electronic device to be neither on nor off. So,
after the IEEE nicked the ICE's standby button (remember?), it decided
some rechristening was in order. The governing body re-named standby
mode "sleep," to invoke the state where humans are neither on nor off.
Today, a crescent moon is the de facto sleep state symbol on devices in
the US and Europe. Its metaphorical power is undeniable! Travel to
Japan, though, and you'll probably see the occasional Zzzz button.
At
Ah @, the only symbol on the list to earn a spot in the MoMa's
architecture and design collection. How has this fetishized symbol
become so potent over the years? It probably has something to do with
the net-ruling rune's deep and mysterious origins. It has been known by
many names: the snail (France and Italy), the little mouse (China), the
monkey's tail (Germany). In 1971, a Bolt, Beranek & Newman
programmer Raymond Tomlinson decided to insert the symbol between
computer network addresses to separate the user from the terminal. Prior
to Tomlinson's use, the @ also graced the keyboard of the American
Underwood in 1885 as an accounting shorthand symbol meaning "at the rate
of." Go back even further and things start to get hazy. Some suggest
that @ has its origins in the sixth century, when monks adopted it as a
better way of wirting the word ad-Latin for "at" or "toward"-that was
not so easily confused with AD, the designation for Anno Domini, or the
the years after the death of Christ.
Firewire
Back in 1995, a small group at Apple-the main developer of
FireWire-set about designing a symbol that could accurately reflect the
new technology they were working on. Originally intended as serial
alternative to SCSI, FireWire's main allure was that it promised
high-speed connectivity for digital audio and video equipment. So
designers opted for a symbol with three prongs, representing video,
audio and data. Initially, the symbol was red, but was later altered to
yellow for unknown reasons.
SBBOD
This terror is known by many names: the hypnowheel of doom, the
spinning pizza, the pinwheel of death, the SBBOD (spinning beach ball of
death). Apple officially calls it "spinning wait cursor," but most Mac
users hail it with a simple expletive. It first appeared in Apple's OSX
and continues to indicate that an application is not responding to
system events. As many have noted, the SBBOD is actually an evolution of
the wristwatch "wait" cursor that the company first used in early
versions of the Mac OS. While its design origins remain mysterious,
Apple likely dropped the watch as it reminded users of the time passing
as the program remained perpetually hung up. Despite this, the modern
iteration has proved only one thing though: it's entirely possible to
despise a pretty, hypnotic spinning wheel.
Update: Thanks to everyone who's written in about
the SBBOD's link to NeXTstep, the descendant of OS X. As Giz reader Alex
Martin notes, "[the SBBOD] was meant to represent the spinning
magneto-optical disk from which NeXTstep OS and applications (very
slowly) loaded."
Ethernet
Despite being "invented" many years prior, the thing we now recognize
as the Ethernet port symbol was actually designed by IBM's David Hill.
According to Hill, the symbol was part of a set of symbols that were all
meant to depict the various local area network connections available at
the time. The array of blocks, which are purposefully non-hierarchical,
each represent computers/terminals. While Hill makes no specific
mention of Bob Metcalfe's earliest Ethernet sketches, it's easy to see how the modern symbol uses them for inspiration.
Texto original en MaximumPC
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