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You've probably seen these symbols on the outside of your PC plenty of times,

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but where exactly did they come from? And why did they look that way?

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I mean, the symbol for Thunderbolt couldn't be any more self-explanatory

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unless you've somehow never seen a storm in your life.

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But what's the history behind the Bluetooth logo? Is it just a spiky bee?

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For Bluetooth, the answer is actually yes.

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And no, Bluetooth owes its logo to this guy,

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Harold Gormson, who's better known as Bluetooth,

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because he wore headphones for every job. Our buddy Harold was the king of Denmark

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during the 10th century AD, and a popular hypothesis is that he earned the name Bluetooth

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from the fact that he had a prominent bad tooth that was a dark bluish color.

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It's just a theory though. King Harold became famous for uniting Denmark and Norway,

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and once an Intel engineer who had been working on the new wireless standard

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learned this fun fact, he thought it would be a good name

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as the goal was to unite wireless devices

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just as Harold united parts of Scandinavia.

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Makes perfect sense, I guess. Anyway, the logo is actually a combination

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of a couple of Nordic runes, one for H and one for B,

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to honor Harold Bluetooth, who I'm sure would be very proud.

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Now let's talk about another symbol with tenuous connections to an ancient figure,

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this thing, which is actually the logo for USB.

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At first glance, it might just look like traces on a circuit board, but there's a popular hypothesis

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that says it was taken from Poseidon's trident

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as being able to use one port to connect to so many different devices

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would make you as powerful as a Greek god. That seems like a stretch to me.

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And I mean, yeah, USB is useful, but I really don't know if it's that exciting.

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In any event, there doesn't appear to be any hard evidence to back the Poseidon theory up.

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Where did it come from? That's what I wanna know. But one thing we can say

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is that the large circle on the left is supposed to represent a PC,

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while the smaller shapes on the right represent different kinds of peripherals.

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So it does try to convey power in the form of versatility,

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just probably without the mythology. Of course, there are many variations to the USB logo

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that indicate what generation and speed the port is,

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but we have an entire dedicated video explaining those, which we'll link to at the end.

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But for now, we're gonna explain why the hard drive activity light

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looks like a little can of soup. You may already know that the hard drive activity light

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illuminates when one of your internal storage devices is being written to, or having data read from it.

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In short, it lets you know that the drive is busy.

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But why a cylinder? Well, the symbol comes from older mechanical hard drives,

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which typically have multiple platters stacked inside,

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forming a cylindrical shape. Back when we were all using mechanical HDDs,

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knowing that the drive was busy was useful, since load times were long.

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So an illuminated light would tell you that the drive was still working

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and that your system hadn't frozen or run into an error.

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But seeing as modern SSDs are much faster due to their lack of moving parts

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and the fact that they can still perform reads and writes even if they're partly busy,

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the drive activity light has become less common, though it's still around on quite a few modern systems.

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Let's wrap things up with one you've seen not just on your PC, but just about everywhere else,

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the power logo, which is a combination of a circle

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that means off and a vertical line that means on.

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The origins of the symbol go back to at least the 1940s,

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inspired by binary code. Engineers would use a zero to indicate the off position

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for a switch with one representing on.

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In the 1970s, the International Electrotechnical Commission

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decided to standardize the combined symbol as an indicator for a standby mode.

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But in 2004, the IEEE published another standard

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that just declared it to mean power. Of course, this symbol also appears on things

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that don't operate using binary code like your blender,

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assuming it doesn't have Alexa yet. Thanks for watching this video.

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Like it if you liked it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Comment below with your suggestions for future videos.

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And hey, go check out our episode where we explain the current state of USB naming.

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It's fun out there.