Photo of Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Obsolete Technology in Unicode

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Screenshot of the Unicode standard. The page shows symbols for Telephone Receivers, Pagers, and Fax Machines.

A short meander through some of the more obscure miscellany within Unicode. Languages hang around far longer than there are native speakers, and symbols get reused and repurposed (🍆). Here are some of the delightfully old-fashioned symbols hidden in your thoroughly modern smartphone. Tapes Long before solid-state drives, we used to record data on long thin strips of magnetic tape. 🖭 📼 I'm sure there's a hipster somewhere who only listens to Kraftwerk on C90 cassettes, and claims that the ima…

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Where do these arrows point?

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This is a blog post about user interfaces. I was wandering along the beach one day, when I noticed some clever chap had drawn some arrows in the sand. Can you guess where they led? The more astute of you will have realised that these are not human drawn arrows. They are, of course, footprints left by birds. A bird's foot is a "backwards" arrow. The apex points to the bird's rear. It is conceivable that had birds evolved greater intelligence and developed a writing system then their → …

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