Do you know the origins of these 5 buttons and icons that we see every day?

Humans’ daily lives have always been marked by graphic symbols that facilitate communications and the various tasks to be performed. This is also true in the age of technology, where buttons and icons are used daily for various activities. In this article we reveal the meaning of 5 symbols we see every day: The Google Maps Placeholderthe buttons “Play” and “Pause”the symbol “ON/OFF” and the icon “Settings”.

1. Map Placeholders

If you were asked to indicate the exact point on a map, you would probably use a red dot to mark a certain location. However, when drawing the dot you should be careful not to cover the information available on the map itself. It is with this logic that the Google Maps Placeholder (also taken up in different forms by other mapping services), which in its original patent is described as “a drop-shaped marker icon that includes a shadow”.

2. Play

The symbol “Play” that we use every day to start and stop video and music playback has rather interesting origins that, lovers of old-fashioned technologies, might even define as “romantic”. In this case, the symbol “Play” was inspired by the old tape recordersparticularly widespread in the 60’s of the last century. At that time it was thought that the triangle with the tip pointing to the right could be the most intuitive solution since that was the direction in which the tape would move. Definitely an intuitive solution!

3. Break

The button icon “Break”formed by two “parallel rods” is a button first seen on old tape recorders and represents the head that reads the tapewhich has the shape of two parallel rectangles. According to other versions, such as the one on the site Gizmodoinstead, the origin of the symbol in question should be sought in musical notation, specifically in the so-called caesura or caesura.

4. ON/OFF

The explanation of the origin of the “ON/OFF” symbolwhich we find on practically any electronic device on the market, is very simple and can be attributed to the binary systema base-2 numeric encoding language, which is commonly used by computer tools to represent information and which is based on a long sequence of 0s and 1s, where 0 is equivalent to off state And 1 is equivalent to access status. Since the “ON/OFF” button serves both to turn an electronic device on and off, in 1973, the International Electrotechnical Commission he thought of “merging” the 0 and the 1 into a single symbol to graphically represent the on/off function.

5. Settings

Throughout the world the symbol of thegear It is commonly used to adjust the settings of applications, operating systems and various software. The genesis of this symbol is to be found in the fact that once upon a time the settings of physical machines required hardware adjustments which, very often, consisted of modifying the physical gears of the latter. This inspired Microsoft designers to design the first gear-shaped icon in history for the settings Windows 95.