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Not really relevant to keyboard symbols, and not PC symbols, and it's not really lost to time, but does anyone know where the Ethernet symbol used on Apple prod
by spijdar 19d ago
Not really relevant to keyboard symbols, and not PC symbols, and it's not really lost to time, but does anyone know where the Ethernet symbol used on Apple products (and ... Android???) comes from? You know, the <...> symbol.
It's most prominently seen and probably associated with Apple products, going back to the first Macs with Ethernet (the Quadra 700/900). It's also used, bizarrely IMO, as the Android Ethernet symbol.
However, I've also seen it on one other type of computer -- Sun/SPARC systems. And on those systems (1990+), it predates the Apple usage on the Quadra (1991+), with at least my IPC having the <...> symbol for Ethernet over the AUI port. (not sure if Apple's NuBus NICs had it or not). Further, it's used on some of my RDI SPARC systems, with a different font.
Someone had to decide to use this symbol first, and I've always wanted to know who. It's distinct from the "iconography" that everyone else uses for Ethernet, and has survived to this day in its weird little Apple (and Android??) branch.
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- Permik 19d agoI don't have the answers, but I'm speculating that it has developed first from being a skeuomorphic text representation depicting a modem/ethernet port, but then just being re-used outside the original and slowly evolving to what it is currently.
- jasomill 19d agoProbably not, as modems connected to Macs via a round serial port identified by a phone icon and Ethernet ports were originally AAUI (D-shaped transciever port similar to AUI but with a smaller connector) or, on some of the old NuBus cards, 10BASE2 (coaxial). I suspect it's just a stylized double-ended arrow representing bidirectional data transfer, created because Apple (or whoever) needed a localization-agnostic way to represent "Ethernet" on hardware.
- cduzz 19d agoThat sounds like "MII" -- the 100mb version of AUI?
- jasomill 19d agoApple used a mechanical variant of AUI called AAUI[1] with a smaller connector. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Attachment_Unit_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Attachment_Unit_Interfac...