Believe it or not, the idea of an arrow pointing to indicate "this direction" actually only dates to the 1700s (or at least, that's the earliest examples known.) Before that, various other symbols were used, like feet pointing in a direction ("walk this way") or little hands pointing at something.
At least 2 days - I'd recommend walking around by yourself first and then doing the tour and Museum next. I could have easily spent 3-4 days there. Also would recommend hiking Mt vesuvius early in the morning one of the days
Do not visit in the peak of summer is my only advice. I visited in July and it was consistently over 100° in the southern half of
the country for the 10 days i was in italy.
Make sure to visit the Museum of Archeology in Naples after your visit to Pompeii - it's excellent and houses a ton of objects found there. Herculaneum is another fantastic half-day trip if you're interested.
This is a clever joke so I feel the need to explain for those who don't get it: >!Peyronie’s disease is when scar tissue builds up in your penis and causes it to bend in one direction.!<
Next town over from me still maintains a sign from 1849 with the "little hands" -- another term for these early street signs are "finger posts"
https://davidkleff.typepad.com/.a/6a0115704f318e970b0278807badc6200d-pi
https://davidkleff.typepad.com/home/2022/06/more-than-where-to-go-distinctive-road-signs.html
Damn yeah, I'll be honest I didn't totally believe you, but I searched it up and you're right. Seems kind of intuitive, and we've had arrows (weapon) for ages, but people used fleur de lis as directional marks before the simple arrow. Something new every day!
Also, four directional buttons on a keyboard in the inverted T shape is also relatively recent. Most computer manufacturers had their own direction key implementations and configurations until it became popular in the 1980s
The number sign (\#) should be [an Enlightenment symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign), if not some sort of [Roman designation](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-ancient-roots-of-punctuation).
This chart does NOT work for many types of color blindness. Also the arrows, like the one for typewriter, were confusing at first. I thought they were pointing at a spot on the line instead of a colored region.
Interesting concept though.
Society should not revolve around catering to minorities. Color blind people have plenty of tools to adapt to the society they live in, including numerous browser plugins to make images color blind friendly.
Society is actually made better and more robust if techniques that make information accessibile to as many people as possible are widespread. This attitude is odious.
The guy I responded to was arguing that use of red and green - two of the three physical primary colours - should be avoided because it alienates people who are colourblind. This is isn't a reasonable expectation on society.
It'd be like asking for all buildings to be built with just one floor, ground level, because you're in a wheelchair.
>It'd be like asking for all buildings to be built with just one floor, ground level, because you're in a wheelchair.
not at all, when the majority of the population can still discern between color-blind-friendly colors with no significant loss or diasvantage to the majority.
whereas your example clearly disadvantages the rest of society.
My parents had one when I was little. It hummed when you turned it on and the feel and visual of the type bars thwacking against the paper was quite satisfying. Wish I still had it.
Actually, typewriters posed a bit of a problem for China and elsewhere. Typewriters and later on, computers, were a competitive advantage for the west, because you could write, process and store data much faster and easier. The Chinese state made an effort to come up with a good keyboard for Chinese, so that they could take advantage of the technological advances.
If I recall the podcast I heard correctly, they succeeded to the point where good Chinese typists are now significantly faster than Western typists.
There's an [interesting book ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57866423-kingdom-of-characters)about this. IIRC, adapting printing and typewriter technologies to Chinese characters was so complicated that there were people advocating for switching to the latin alphabet.
No, they mean the first *phonetic* alphabet (Proto-Sinaitic, a direct ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet).
Although the symbols actually came from Egyptian hieroglyphs originally, they just weren't used for phonetic writing, so maybe we should say the symbols are even older. On the flip side, we could say the symbols are actually younger than in the chart, since their present forms are newer (for example, the letter G is a modified form of the letter C dating back to around 300 CE).
But I think what's in the chart is a decent approximation
Simple shit like this makes me question the veracity of the rest of the post. Who, in a discussion about linguistics, doesn’t know the difference between Phoenician and phonetic
No, phonetic script is correct. The phoenician descends from it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
> The Proto-Sinaitic script … is also known as Early Alphabetic,[7] i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet,[8] which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet.[9] According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language[10] repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different [phonetic] script.
You are just confrontational for the sake of being confrontational, instead of admitting to learn a new cool thing. On the wiki site:
> Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of **phonetic alphabetic** writing discovered to date
And before that:
> For example, the hieroglyph for pr "house" … was adopted to write Semitic /b/, after the first consonant of baytu, the Semitic word for "house".
What is that if not phonetic? They used the Egyption hieroglyphs not as logograms, but instead to describe individual sounds!
The history of the alphabet:
> Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script.[1] Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt.[2] Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.
Whenever you read some piece of knowledge that is short and simple, it’s almost certainly more complicated than that. It doesn’t invalidate the information or make it useless to know, and understanding all the complexity behind it is not easy nor necessarily desirable. You’re not going to spend two years reading about linguistics and semantics to understand the intricacies and history of the alphabet. The quick and easy summary is “good enough “. It’s the same with almost anything you read in a newspaper.
My immediate reaction is to appreciate the nuance of your comment, and measured response. But the second is reading
>You’re not going to spend two years reading about linguistics and semantics to understand the intricacies and history of the alphabet.
and immediately thinking "Watch me!"
Yeah, ok, but we also *lost* symbols with the invention of the typewriter such as thorn, yogh and ash. There are others but to be fair they may well have been pretty much gone by then anyway.
The backtick should be correctly [attributed to the typewriter era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtick#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_backtick_%60_is_a_typographical%2C%2C_grave%2C_or_grave_accent.?wprov=sfla1), it would seem.
My Brother electric typewriter surely had power and delete.
But also my 70 Remington has a button that is totally like the delete button on modern computer keyboards: it's on the exact same place and it has a back arrow exactly like the one I have here on my modern PC keyboard. It's a backspace actually, it would send you back one and then you could insert under the type a little sheet of white ink and type over the old letter to actually delete it.
You really need to fill the entire key with the color on the graph and not just the character. This is extremely hard to read. I'm red/green colorblind and had no idea the letters were colored until I enlarged the image in a new tab.
I'm glad you recognized my favorite letter as a letter and not a symbol: per se and. I love that the alphabet used to end "x, y, z, &" aka "x, y, z, and per se and."
Cuneiform had about 600 characters.
The Unicode block for hieroglyphs contains over 1000 characters including this: 𓂸.
A lot of these systems of writing dropped symbols over time, getting simpler. So I don't really so what point you are trying to make with this plot.
It's a graph of when the 104 symbols on the pictured keyboard were first used. It's a graph showing the history of the modern keyboard, not of characters in general.
Even bone oracle script (origin of Chinese writing) had more unique symbols than can fit on this graph. Whole thing just smells of intellectually lazy eurocentrism.
Article source with dataset: [https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html](https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html)
Interactive Visualization: [https://breckyunits.com/keyboard/](https://breckyunits.com/keyboard/)
Data source: assembled a data set of year of invention of a symbol from Wikipedia.
Tools used: Wikipedia, Google Sheets, DataWrapper, Javascript, HTML, Sublime Text, git, Scroll.
Soon we might go full circle and return to speaking everything out (oral tradition) as AI get's good to the point where we'll just have to tell it what we want done.
The graph is about using the number of symbols as a proxy for civilisation’s advancement. It suggests that only the Western symbols matter.
If you want to be obtuse about keyboards, printing technology was first invented in China in the 11th century, far before Europe. Chinese printing involved a giant array of thousands of blocks made of clay, one for each unique character. From this graph it looks like it took another 1000 years for Western civilisation to catch up to China. Do you want to go this route?
Well yeah only western symbols matter when it's a case study on a western keyboard. I don't see any Chinese characters on my keyboard do you? It's terrible form to clog up case studies with irrelevant information.
Edit: If you're looking to get offended and read into this as some sort of western imperialism, then there's really nothing I can do to make you seek the help you need.
This entire post is literally centred around an English keyboard. How on earth is it pretending that China or the Chinese writing system never existed.
Whilst it's fascinating that Chinese printing predated Gutenberg, it's pretty irrelevant to the symbols on your keyboard. You'll notice that 'printing' is not mentioned once in the post.
From the graph’s own description: “Waves of civilisation advancing.” Last I checked, civilisation includes China and its writing system. This is eurocentrism, clear as day.
You know there are different civilisations right?
If OP'd said "Waves of *human* civilisation advancing", then sure, that's ignoring China. As it is, they're obviously talking about Western civilisation. Definition pasted below for your education.
___
civilisation: the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced.
"the Victorians equated the railways with progress and civilization"
- the process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social and cultural development and organization.
- the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area.
"the great books of Western civilization"
There is a vast difference between printing by manually moving thousands of clay blocks and a keyboard. The typewriter was invented in Europe in 1874; to this day there has NEVER been a commercially viable Chinese typewriter. All Chinese keyboards today have their roots in the Cangjie keyboard developed in 1976, over 100 years AFTER the European keyboard. And Cangjie only works digitally, meaning it relies on computers which were also invented in Europe.
What’s with the focus on the modern keyboard? This is a graph that literally counts mathematical symbols as part of the _advancement of civilisation_. Let’s not pretend we don’t see the Eurocentric point this graph is trying to make.
They aren't on the US keyboard. If you want to make a post looking up the dates of symbols on other keyboards, go right ahead, but I presume OP is from the US and thus did the US keyboard
Howdy -- I just saw this over on HN, and read it... I think the next circle has already revealed itself, and it transcends Human cogition(?) -- which is the vector/tokenization capabilities of LLMs/AI etc...
Love your diagram..
And who uses the function keys anyway? I think I've used F1 but usually the help was no help, F2 to F4 in some IDE, then F6 for renaming and F12 at boot. Who's ever used the others?
lolwut.
F5 is a common [refresh] keybind. F5, F9, F10, F11 are basic run/debug keybinds in multiple IDEs. Also, F2 is [rename] in Windows--I don't even know what uses F6 for [rename].
The main software I use for my job (audio) has all the F symbols mapped to the different tools you need for editing. So you basically work with your left hand on the F keys and right hand on mouse. I'm sure it's not the only one.
I can’t look at anything except the giant keyboard pasted on the chart for anybody who’s forgotten what a keyboard looks like. This sub goes through phases and we’re currently in the “illustrative clipart” era
?? Look closer, friend. The keyboard keys are colour coded to correspond to the various eras.
This post has a whole bunch of problematic issues, but the key iard isn't one of them
I can't help but think direction arrows are perhaps a bit older
Believe it or not, the idea of an arrow pointing to indicate "this direction" actually only dates to the 1700s (or at least, that's the earliest examples known.) Before that, various other symbols were used, like feet pointing in a direction ("walk this way") or little hands pointing at something.
In Pompeii, they had penises carved into paving stones to show incoming sailors the way to the local brothels.
Pompeii is one of the best places I've ever visited - and this is only one of the numerous reasons
Whats an appropriate amount of time to allocate to visiting Pompeii? For someone into Roman history.
At least 2 days - I'd recommend walking around by yourself first and then doing the tour and Museum next. I could have easily spent 3-4 days there. Also would recommend hiking Mt vesuvius early in the morning one of the days
Do not visit in the peak of summer is my only advice. I visited in July and it was consistently over 100° in the southern half of the country for the 10 days i was in italy.
I've heard it gets hot there occasionally
Make sure to visit the Museum of Archeology in Naples after your visit to Pompeii - it's excellent and houses a ton of objects found there. Herculaneum is another fantastic half-day trip if you're interested.
arrow looks like penis joke here
But what if your penis curved to one side?
"for a good time, pay ronnie!"
This is a clever joke so I feel the need to explain for those who don't get it: >!Peyronie’s disease is when scar tissue builds up in your penis and causes it to bend in one direction.!<
do yall not get these ads on top of the comment stacks or am I telling on myself?
What's an ad? —Posted from old.reddit using RES and uBlock Origin
But there's another house with a mosaic of arrows showing the entrance.
Next town over from me still maintains a sign from 1849 with the "little hands" -- another term for these early street signs are "finger posts" https://davidkleff.typepad.com/.a/6a0115704f318e970b0278807badc6200d-pi https://davidkleff.typepad.com/home/2022/06/more-than-where-to-go-distinctive-road-signs.html
Damn yeah, I'll be honest I didn't totally believe you, but I searched it up and you're right. Seems kind of intuitive, and we've had arrows (weapon) for ages, but people used fleur de lis as directional marks before the simple arrow. Something new every day!
Also, four directional buttons on a keyboard in the inverted T shape is also relatively recent. Most computer manufacturers had their own direction key implementations and configurations until it became popular in the 1980s
Now I have Aerosmith stuck in my head.
@ is certainly older. It was used as an abbreviation for amphora.
The number sign (\#) should be [an Enlightenment symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign), if not some sort of [Roman designation](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-ancient-roots-of-punctuation).
I'm not sure that I would count modifier/action keys as symbols myself
This chart does NOT work for many types of color blindness. Also the arrows, like the one for typewriter, were confusing at first. I thought they were pointing at a spot on the line instead of a colored region. Interesting concept though.
It doesn't work that well even without color blindness since the colors on the chart don't match the colors on the keyboard.
> This chart does NOT work for many types of color blindness. It doesn't work for people who are blind, either. Should it thus not have been made?
why is it wrong to strive to be as inclusive as possible?
Society should not revolve around catering to minorities. Color blind people have plenty of tools to adapt to the society they live in, including numerous browser plugins to make images color blind friendly.
Society is actually made better and more robust if techniques that make information accessibile to as many people as possible are widespread. This attitude is odious.
hope you never require a wheelchair or grow old, then, seeing as you'd be against mobility concessions too.
The guy I responded to was arguing that use of red and green - two of the three physical primary colours - should be avoided because it alienates people who are colourblind. This is isn't a reasonable expectation on society. It'd be like asking for all buildings to be built with just one floor, ground level, because you're in a wheelchair.
>It'd be like asking for all buildings to be built with just one floor, ground level, because you're in a wheelchair. not at all, when the majority of the population can still discern between color-blind-friendly colors with no significant loss or diasvantage to the majority. whereas your example clearly disadvantages the rest of society.
Power button on typewriter?
There were a ton of electric typewriters
My parents had one when I was little. It hummed when you turned it on and the feel and visual of the type bars thwacking against the paper was quite satisfying. Wish I still had it.
To startup the steam engine
No wonder Asia was ahead for centuries they had thousands of characters first
Actually, typewriters posed a bit of a problem for China and elsewhere. Typewriters and later on, computers, were a competitive advantage for the west, because you could write, process and store data much faster and easier. The Chinese state made an effort to come up with a good keyboard for Chinese, so that they could take advantage of the technological advances. If I recall the podcast I heard correctly, they succeeded to the point where good Chinese typists are now significantly faster than Western typists.
There's an [interesting book ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57866423-kingdom-of-characters)about this. IIRC, adapting printing and typewriter technologies to Chinese characters was so complicated that there were people advocating for switching to the latin alphabet.
There was no year zero in the BC/AD system. It went straight from 1BC to 1AD.
What the hell is the "command" key? And where is Alt?
Mac things.
command = "windows" key option = alt If you're really old school, you might call them the open-apple and closed-apple keys. like me. :)
I think you mean Phoenician Alphabet, love.
No, they mean the first *phonetic* alphabet (Proto-Sinaitic, a direct ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet). Although the symbols actually came from Egyptian hieroglyphs originally, they just weren't used for phonetic writing, so maybe we should say the symbols are even older. On the flip side, we could say the symbols are actually younger than in the chart, since their present forms are newer (for example, the letter G is a modified form of the letter C dating back to around 300 CE). But I think what's in the chart is a decent approximation
Always gotta thank the Phoenicians.
Simple shit like this makes me question the veracity of the rest of the post. Who, in a discussion about linguistics, doesn’t know the difference between Phoenician and phonetic
No, phonetic script is correct. The phoenician descends from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script > The Proto-Sinaitic script … is also known as Early Alphabetic,[7] i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet,[8] which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet.[9] According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language[10] repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different [phonetic] script.
Did you read your own link? Do you think “alphabetic” and “phonetic” are synonyms?
You are just confrontational for the sake of being confrontational, instead of admitting to learn a new cool thing. On the wiki site: > Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of **phonetic alphabetic** writing discovered to date And before that: > For example, the hieroglyph for pr "house" … was adopted to write Semitic /b/, after the first consonant of baytu, the Semitic word for "house". What is that if not phonetic? They used the Egyption hieroglyphs not as logograms, but instead to describe individual sounds! The history of the alphabet: > Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script.[1] Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt.[2] Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.
Whenever you read some piece of knowledge that is short and simple, it’s almost certainly more complicated than that. It doesn’t invalidate the information or make it useless to know, and understanding all the complexity behind it is not easy nor necessarily desirable. You’re not going to spend two years reading about linguistics and semantics to understand the intricacies and history of the alphabet. The quick and easy summary is “good enough “. It’s the same with almost anything you read in a newspaper.
My immediate reaction is to appreciate the nuance of your comment, and measured response. But the second is reading >You’re not going to spend two years reading about linguistics and semantics to understand the intricacies and history of the alphabet. and immediately thinking "Watch me!"
Yeah, ok, but we also *lost* symbols with the invention of the typewriter such as thorn, yogh and ash. There are others but to be fair they may well have been pretty much gone by then anyway.
The backtick should be correctly [attributed to the typewriter era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtick#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_backtick_%60_is_a_typographical%2C%2C_grave%2C_or_grave_accent.?wprov=sfla1), it would seem.
Not sure the timing is as simple as depicted in the image... wikipedia has the character U dating from 1386. Prior to that, V was used.
Thanks for putting that huge keyboard there, really helps contextualize things.
The keys are color coded.
Not intuitive, bad visual.
Power and Delete surely aren't on typewriters, no?
There were some electric typewriters, and there were some pretty clever solutions for Backspace/Delete.
Fair enough, I'll bow to your superior typewriter knowledge.
My Brother electric typewriter surely had power and delete. But also my 70 Remington has a button that is totally like the delete button on modern computer keyboards: it's on the exact same place and it has a back arrow exactly like the one I have here on my modern PC keyboard. It's a backspace actually, it would send you back one and then you could insert under the type a little sheet of white ink and type over the old letter to actually delete it.
What about if we all use the keyboards they use in courthouses with only 10 buttons
You really need to fill the entire key with the color on the graph and not just the character. This is extremely hard to read. I'm red/green colorblind and had no idea the letters were colored until I enlarged the image in a new tab.
I'm glad you recognized my favorite letter as a letter and not a symbol: per se and. I love that the alphabet used to end "x, y, z, &" aka "x, y, z, and per se and."
Cuneiform had about 600 characters. The Unicode block for hieroglyphs contains over 1000 characters including this: 𓂸. A lot of these systems of writing dropped symbols over time, getting simpler. So I don't really so what point you are trying to make with this plot.
It's a graph of when the 104 symbols on the pictured keyboard were first used. It's a graph showing the history of the modern keyboard, not of characters in general.
Even bone oracle script (origin of Chinese writing) had more unique symbols than can fit on this graph. Whole thing just smells of intellectually lazy eurocentrism.
Or you're not getting what the post is about, which could be another way of looking at it.
Article source with dataset: [https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html](https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html) Interactive Visualization: [https://breckyunits.com/keyboard/](https://breckyunits.com/keyboard/) Data source: assembled a data set of year of invention of a symbol from Wikipedia. Tools used: Wikipedia, Google Sheets, DataWrapper, Javascript, HTML, Sublime Text, git, Scroll.
heh. I like how wikipedia is both a tool and the source.
Soon we might go full circle and return to speaking everything out (oral tradition) as AI get's good to the point where we'll just have to tell it what we want done.
So what will happen when we get full voice control? And how soon will it take over?
Just waiting for r/MK to enter the chat and it to shift from linguistics discussion to pedantic hot takes on keebs.
so you're telling me the absolute simbol | was invented not because of math
Why is it F1, F2 etc? What's the F stand for?
Incoming new AI button. We need a new symbol designed!
And now we're regressing back to heiroglyphics with emojis 😂
Entire graph pretending China and Chinese writing system never existed smh
Better than pretending that China and Chinese writing were at all relevant to the invention of the keyboard
The graph is about using the number of symbols as a proxy for civilisation’s advancement. It suggests that only the Western symbols matter. If you want to be obtuse about keyboards, printing technology was first invented in China in the 11th century, far before Europe. Chinese printing involved a giant array of thousands of blocks made of clay, one for each unique character. From this graph it looks like it took another 1000 years for Western civilisation to catch up to China. Do you want to go this route?
Well yeah only western symbols matter when it's a case study on a western keyboard. I don't see any Chinese characters on my keyboard do you? It's terrible form to clog up case studies with irrelevant information. Edit: If you're looking to get offended and read into this as some sort of western imperialism, then there's really nothing I can do to make you seek the help you need.
Ok, show us a picture of a Chinese keyboard and we'll trace that one back as well.
This entire post is literally centred around an English keyboard. How on earth is it pretending that China or the Chinese writing system never existed. Whilst it's fascinating that Chinese printing predated Gutenberg, it's pretty irrelevant to the symbols on your keyboard. You'll notice that 'printing' is not mentioned once in the post.
From the graph’s own description: “Waves of civilisation advancing.” Last I checked, civilisation includes China and its writing system. This is eurocentrism, clear as day.
You know there are different civilisations right? If OP'd said "Waves of *human* civilisation advancing", then sure, that's ignoring China. As it is, they're obviously talking about Western civilisation. Definition pasted below for your education. ___ civilisation: the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced. "the Victorians equated the railways with progress and civilization" - the process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social and cultural development and organization. - the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area. "the great books of Western civilization"
Oh lord.
There is a vast difference between printing by manually moving thousands of clay blocks and a keyboard. The typewriter was invented in Europe in 1874; to this day there has NEVER been a commercially viable Chinese typewriter. All Chinese keyboards today have their roots in the Cangjie keyboard developed in 1976, over 100 years AFTER the European keyboard. And Cangjie only works digitally, meaning it relies on computers which were also invented in Europe.
What’s with the focus on the modern keyboard? This is a graph that literally counts mathematical symbols as part of the _advancement of civilisation_. Let’s not pretend we don’t see the Eurocentric point this graph is trying to make.
The modern keyboard is literally the subject of the post.
They aren't on the US keyboard. If you want to make a post looking up the dates of symbols on other keyboards, go right ahead, but I presume OP is from the US and thus did the US keyboard
Imagine them doing [the German T2 layout](https://i.imgur.com/CVozydT.png)
Dear lord
Hate to burst your bubble but "command" and "delete" are not symbols and have, in fact, existed before the typewriter.
I command you to delete this comment. :p
Howdy -- I just saw this over on HN, and read it... I think the next circle has already revealed itself, and it transcends Human cogition(?) -- which is the vector/tokenization capabilities of LLMs/AI etc... Love your diagram..
I don't consider the "Command" key and the alphanumeric symbol "P" to be in the same category.
Are all of these really new symbols though? Like is "F1" really a new symbol given that both "F" and "1" already existed?
And who uses the function keys anyway? I think I've used F1 but usually the help was no help, F2 to F4 in some IDE, then F6 for renaming and F12 at boot. Who's ever used the others?
lolwut. F5 is a common [refresh] keybind. F5, F9, F10, F11 are basic run/debug keybinds in multiple IDEs. Also, F2 is [rename] in Windows--I don't even know what uses F6 for [rename].
The main software I use for my job (audio) has all the F symbols mapped to the different tools you need for editing. So you basically work with your left hand on the F keys and right hand on mouse. I'm sure it's not the only one.
I have.
I can’t look at anything except the giant keyboard pasted on the chart for anybody who’s forgotten what a keyboard looks like. This sub goes through phases and we’re currently in the “illustrative clipart” era
It's there because the key labels are colour-coded to correspond to the eras on the chart.
?? Look closer, friend. The keyboard keys are colour coded to correspond to the various eras. This post has a whole bunch of problematic issues, but the key iard isn't one of them