Each makovodov presses this button a number of times every day, not knowing exactly what it stands for. We are talking about a key with a strange twisted icon titled Command (character Unicode U + 2318). By itself, an icon known for more than 2500 years in Europe and has a lot of symbolic names, the most famous of which - Heraldic node ring Gorgon and hands of St. John. However, in the computer industry this character was very different.
This is how the story of one of the then Apple employees:
"Working on computer Apple III, we believe that consumers should be able to perform every command in the menu with shortcuts, so we added a new dedicated button. We called it the «Apple" button, when pressed in combination with other keys, it selects the appropriate menu command. We drew a little Apple logo on the right side of each menu item, which can be accessed using a combination with this button.
Once in the evening, Steve Jobs broke into the office developers, something upset. This was unusual. Apparently, he first saw MacDraw application, which in comparison with other applications was a very large menu.
"The screen is too many apples! It is nonsense! We do of the Apple logo empty bragging! We need to stop doing that! "
After we told him what function carries this icon, Steve said that we have to choose another character instead of the Apple logo, and since this change was to touch the user instructions and production of keyboards, we had only a couple of days on the search for something new.
Quite difficult to find an appropriate small image that would carry a corresponding meaning, and at first, we just did not occur. Our designer icons Susan Cahir It was a complete directory of international characters and she thumbed through it in search of a suitable character, which would have been understandable, attractive and had to anything relating to the command menu concept.
Eventually she stopped on the icon that has been used in Sweden to indicate attractions and camping sites. It rendered a small icon in the resolution of 16 × 16, showed his team and everyone liked it. Since then, it took 30 years, and is still an icon performs its function in OS X. »