If you’re over the age of 30, there’s a good chance you didn’t learn how to use a computer on a Mac. As such, it was only well into your computing journey that you first met the Command key — that large button with a pretzel-shaped logo next to your space bar.
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The Command key is arguably the most important key on a Mac, and it’s required for just about every major keyboard shortcut. But what was the original purpose of this key that is unique to Macs and, more curiously, why does it look so weird?
“The Apple Key”
The Command key dates back to the early 1980s, and its secrets are bound up in its original name: the “Apple Key.”
The original purpose of the key was to allow you to completely do away with a mouse.
According to Andy Hertzfeld, an American software engineer who helped develop the original Macintosh computer, the original purpose of the key was to allow you to completely do away with a mouse. In combination with the other keys, it allows you to operate your machine without ever touching — or even having — a mouse, a situation that was far more common before the trackpad laptop took over computing.
The name “Command” key, and the now-iconic symbol, are in part thanks to the whims of Steve Jobs. During the development of MacDraw, a drawing app that released with the Apple Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs decided the Apple name and logo were being overused, which was diluting the brand.
Think Different
Back in the 1980s, the Apple logo was everywhere — on every menu screen, all over the keyboard and, of course, directly on the Apple key. It was a situation Jobs described as “taking the Apple logo in vain.”
That decision meant there would also need to be an alternative logo, a duty that fell to Susan Kare, Apple’s resident bitmap artist at the time.
Tasked with finding a symbol to represent the very abstract notion of “command,” Kare came upon the current now-iconic pretzel-shaped design, which is used in Nordic countries to indicate a campground on a map.
Decades later, the symbol still persists. And why not? Can you think of anything better?
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