Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side – Unsung

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My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

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Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side

Various old computers had their keyboards adorned with unique symbols. Companies like Commodore, Atari, Amiga, or even – in its previous life – Apple chose to put their company logos on keys, and there were other weird and obscure keys on weird and obscure keyboards.
But it was Apple’s recent push to move their American keyboards closer to European ones by embracing more iconography, that made me think of forgotten key symbols less obscure, ones that belonged to platforms we still use today. Even on a Mac and a PC, some key symbols didn’t make it to modern times. So let’s start with the PC side today since that part of the story begins earlier, and do Macs in a follow-up post.
For a lot of 20th century, a battle has been waging between words and icons. The first salvo was, perhaps, the traffic signs: America embraced words, while Europe relied more on iconography. (As much as it looks like it, it wasn’t just “graphic design vs. not”; as a more varied continent with multiple languages, Europe needed a more universal visual language to help people travelling between countries.)
This, I understand, trickled down to other things: home electronics, and computers. There, iconography also made it easier to make one product and sell it across all of Europe, without needing to introduce many SKUs with different UI strings.
Here’s IBM’s Selectric typewriter from the 1970s, in its American and European edition:

(If you’re curious, Express was a very fast Backspace, and Index moved the page down; both were prototypes of future arrow keys.)
Here’s IBM’s early 1130 computer from 1965, which sported an unusual symbol for space:

Some IBM laboratory and scientific computers in the 1970s and even 1980s veered more into iconography, but eventually lost to text as office PC users rejected the confusing symbols. As their keyboards morphed into PC/​Windows keyboards we know today, only four symbols remained and gained widespread acceptance: ⇧ for Shift, ↵ for Enter, ⇥ for Tab, and some version of an arrow for Backspace.
But let’s look at those old symbols, some beautiful, all interesting.
The two symbols below are: Print Screen (old CRT screen turning into a piece of paper) and key beep – popular when people were transitioning from loud typewriters to relatively quiet keyboards:

Here – on the front edge of the also-forgotten Reverse Tab – you can see Home, which historically meant “return to the top left corner of the screen” and sometimes even “clear the screen”:

But my favourites were these, for Insert (now gone) and Delete (still with us):

These seem inspired by proofreader marks, which feels wonderfully old-time’y:

Building on that visual language, one could also find invert/​reverse video, blinking, and underline:

And this absolute beauty, which I think meant “delete word”:

The really interesting thing is that some of those symbols survive today in Unicode. I spotted at least ⎀, ⎃, ⎁, and ⎂. The last two are for contiguous and non-contiguous underline, which I feel is a story I should know, but I don’t (yet).
Sep 11, 2026history 56 iconography 18 keyboard 53 localization 8

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Unsung © 2025–2026 Marcin WicharyNo gen AI was used in writing and designing Unsung, but some was used in building the tooling for it. AI policyDesign revision 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

The evolution of keyboard symbols reflects a broader historical tension between verbal language and visual iconography, a dynamic that extended from traffic signs to the design of home electronics and ultimately computing interfaces. As the author Marcin Wichary explores the history of these symbols, he posits that earlier devices, such as the IBM Selectric typewriter and early IBM computers, incorporated unique symbols, demonstrating an early adoption of iconography to facilitate universal communication across regions, particularly in Europe. This trend suggested a move away from purely textual instructions toward a more visual language for product representation.

However, the integration of these symbols into computing faced resistance. While some laboratory and scientific computers in the 1970s and 1980s experimented with iconography, these visual cues eventually yielded to textual representation as office PC users rejected the confusing symbols. This shift led to a simplification, resulting in only four symbols gaining widespread acceptance on PC/Windows keyboards today: the Shift key (⇧), the Enter key (↵), the Tab key (<0xE2><0x87><0xA5>), and a variation of an arrow for the Backspace function.

Despite this standardization, many earlier symbols remain fascinating artifacts of design history. Wichary highlights several specific forgotten symbols, including those related to display functions and editing, such as the Print Screen symbol, which depicted a CRT screen turning into a piece of paper, and the key beep symbol, which emerged during the transition from loud typewriters to quieter keyboards. Further lost symbols include the Reverse Tab symbol, which historically signified returning to the top left corner of the screen or clearing the screen, as well as symbols for the Insert and Delete functions, which were subsequently removed from the modern layout.

The broader visual language of editing and display also featured symbols for invert or reverse video, blinking, and underlines. Furthermore, the text notes that some of these symbols persist in the Unicode standard, referencing specific characters such as <0xE2><0x8E><0x80>, <0xE2><0x8E><0x83>, <0xE2><0x8E><0x81>, and <0xE2><0x8E><0x82>, which represent contiguous and non-contiguous underlines, suggesting an enduring, albeit less visible, lineage of these visual notations. The entire history underscores the continuous negotiation between visual design, functional usability, and the adoption of established textual conventions in technology.