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I 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 the

by Permik 20d ago

I 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 20d ago
Probably 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.