You would have seen them everywhere. You could have even used one of them today to perform some task or the other in your day-today activities as they can be instantaneously recognized. They are the symbols and icons you press, click and ogle innumerable times a day when you interact with your computer.

POWER

During the time of World War II, the engineers used the binary system to label individual power buttons and keys: “A1” meant “ON,” and “A0” meant “OFF”. In 1973, the International Electromechanical Commission vaguely coded a broken circle with a line inside it as “standby power state”. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers later felt that it was too hazy, and altered the symbol to simply mean “POWER”.

p[p[[p][

BLUETOOTH

Danish King, Harald Blåtand of the 10th-century, was passionate on eating blueberries; finally one of his teeth was permanently stained blue. It just happened the first Bluetooth receptor also had a “teeth-like” shape, and was blue. But the symbolic interplay doesn’t end there. As the Bluetooth SIG notes, Blåtand was instrumental in uniting military factions in parts of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark – similar to the Bluetooth technology that’s designed to allow association between differing industries such as the computing, mobile phone and automotive markets.

l

USB

kl;klj

Created along with the USB 1.0 spec, the USB symbol was made to look like Neptune’s Trident. In-lieu of the pointed triangles at the tip of the three-pronged spear, the USB advertisers chose to alter the shapes to a triangle, square and circle. This was done to indicate that diverse peripherals that could be attached using the standard.

l’

j

AT

In 1971, The Beranek & Newman programmer Raymond Tomlinson decided to insert the symbol between the network addresses to split the username from that of the website name. Prior to Tomlinson’s application, the @ symbol also appeared on the keyboard of the American Underwood in 1885 as a shorthand symbol meaning “at the rate of.” But the initial use of the symbol stretches back even further to the sixth century, when monks adopted it as a better way of writing the Latin word for “at” or “toward”-that was easily confusing during the time of A.D.

[

PLAY

While the Play/Pause symbols aren’t anything to do with computers. They have made their own way onto keyboards, media players (real and virtual), and every other device capable of playing audio or video. The play symbols first appeared as tape transport symbols on reel-to-reel tape decks in the 1960s. The direction of the play arrow indicated the direction in which the tape moved.

i

i

PAUSE

i

i

As far as the pause symbol goes, many have identified that it resembles the symbol for an open connection on an electrical connection diagram. In musical notation, the caesura symbol (similar to the pause symbol) indicates a – wait for it – pause.

i

1

FIREWALL

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. So designers opted for a symbol with three spokes to represent video, audio and data. Initially, the symbol was in red, but was later altered to yellow for unknown reasons.

i

i

i

ETHERNET

Despite being “invented” many years prior, the thing we now recognize as the Ethernet port symbol was originally designed by IBM’s David Hill. According to Hill, the symbol was part of a set of symbols that were all meant to represent various local area network connections available at the time. The arrays of blocks, which are purposefully non-hierarchical, each represent computers/terminals.