Image source: Jason Michael, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 License

Most keys on a keyboard make intuitive sense, even to a novice computer user, since nearly all of them are labeled with either familiar symbols (such as letters or numbers) or with recognizable words (enter, delete, escape). The Apple key, however, has no familiar symbols beyond the company logo, a mark whose meaning on something that you press is unclear. Also on that key, the presence of a second, even less-meaningful mark -- the so-called “propeller” -- and the lack of a written label add to user confusion.

Try explaining basic user interface tasks to anyone new to the Mac, and you’ll see what I mean. You can refer to it as “the Apple key,” which is descriptive, but the apple symbol has no on-screen significance. The propeller mark does appear on-screen, but only the Mac-initiated know that propeller means command. As a result, the Apple key is now called the command key, but that wasn’t always the case.

Having wondered about this glaring usability flaw for years, I was excited to discover this interview with members of the Lisa development team from the February 1983 issue of Byte Magazine. The Lisa was Apple’s short-lived, yet groundbreaking predecessor to the Macintosh. In the interview, Larry Tesler, who was in charge of the Lisa’s applications software, explains how the Apple logo ended up on the keyboard:

[In a prototype version of the keyboard] you saw two keys that said Command on them. The new version has only one, and instead of saying Command it has a picture of an apple on it. The reason is that the key’s used as a shortcut to choose a menu command. If you look at a menu, on the right you’ll see this little apple symbol and a letter.

Image source: DigiBarn, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

If you hold down the Apple key and the letter, you get the command. We couldn’t find any way to symbolize the Command key that would fit nicely in a menu and be recognizable to people. We tried and tried. Finally we decided that the apple looked nice and had a nice sound to it -- “Apple X,” “Apple R” -- and it keeps Apple in the mind of the user instead of “control” or something else. It’s a symbol that everybody using this machine will recognize instantly, so we decided to put it on the key as well as on the screen.

The Macintosh project “borrowed” many user interface concepts from the Lisa team (who, in turn, had borrowed from Xerox’s Star), including the innovation of associating key-combination shortcuts with graphical menu items. But the Macintosh abandoned the Apple symbol in its menu shortcuts in favor of a geometric, propeller-like shape that represented “command.” Although the new abstract symbol is even less meaningful to the uninitiated, it makes more sense as visual shorthand than the company’s logo. For almost the entire history of the Macintosh, though, this key has been marked with both symbols, even though the Mac’s on-screen UI always referred to it as “command” and never “Apple.”

Only in the last year or so has Apple dropped the vestigial logo from the command key, starting with the new aluminum keyboard (below) as well as on the MacBook. The word “command” or at least “cmd” has been added, too -- something that should have been done 24 years ago.

Image source: Declan Jewell, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

First, what I really wanted to see was the computer with the first true GUI -- the Xerox Alto:

Next up, the classic PDP-1, known to me as the machine on which the very first video game, Spacewar!, was programmed by some folks at MIT in 1962. Today, you can play Spacewar! online. When you do, notice that the spaceships are affected by “gravity” from the black hole in the center of the screen, but that the fired missiles are not. That’s due to the fact that the spaceship calculations were already maxing out the PDP-1’s processor cycles. And yes, that hulking monolith in the background is the CPU. The display and light pen are the interface. And those really are stacks of manila punchcards on the desk.

Two more landmark devices: On the left, an Interface Message Processor. This particular IMP was one of the first nodes on the ARPANET, which of course eventually grew into the Internet that we know today. On the right, one of Doug Engelbart’s first mice.

And now for a computer that nobody except the museum has heard of: the Kitchen Computer. From the museum’s description:

The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog as a $10,600 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold.

I guess for some people, filing 3-by-5 cards in a box is easier than learning binary. Actually, just memorizing all your recipes would be easier than learning binary. “If it’s not usable, it doesn’t work.” An early, expensive lesson in the importance of usability.

And finally, some early ASCII art (“in color” even!) -- the Mona Lisa represented in ASCII by H. Philip Peterson in 1964: