The forgotten Mac keyboard glyphs: Canada's CSA icons and Japan's Kotoeri pencil

A design retrospective traces obscure Apple keyboard variants shaped by national standards and internal engineering choices. National regulation drove real hardware forks: 1990s PowerBooks (and ThinkPads) shipped a Germany-only beige model to satisfy laws on keyboard color and contrast meant to reduce glare for terminal operators. The bigger focus is a Canadian layout, likely mandated by CSA/ACNOR standards, that mirrored the European key arrangement but swapped in a distinct—and, in the author’s view, unattractive—set of glyphs for Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock, Esc, the arrow and Enter/Return keys. These symbols persisted across several models from the mid-1990s AppleDesign keyboard to early metal keyboards, appear to have faded by the late 2000s, and survive in Unicode (⇬⇭⎆⎈⇱⇲⎗⎘) even though Apple no longer prints them.