You've probably seen these symbols on the outside of your PC plenty of times,
but where exactly did they come from? And why did they look that way?
I mean, the symbol for Thunderbolt couldn't be any more self-explanatory
unless you've somehow never seen a storm in your life.
But what's the history behind the Bluetooth logo? Is it just a spiky bee?
For Bluetooth, the answer is actually yes.
And no, Bluetooth owes its logo to this guy,
Harold Gormson, who's better known as Bluetooth,
because he wore headphones for every job. Our buddy Harold was the king of Denmark
during the 10th century AD, and a popular hypothesis is that he earned the name Bluetooth
from the fact that he had a prominent bad tooth that was a dark bluish color.
It's just a theory though. King Harold became famous for uniting Denmark and Norway,
and once an Intel engineer who had been working on the new wireless standard
learned this fun fact, he thought it would be a good name
as the goal was to unite wireless devices
just as Harold united parts of Scandinavia.
Makes perfect sense, I guess. Anyway, the logo is actually a combination
of a couple of Nordic runes, one for H and one for B,
to honor Harold Bluetooth, who I'm sure would be very proud.
Now let's talk about another symbol with tenuous connections to an ancient figure,
this thing, which is actually the logo for USB.
At first glance, it might just look like traces on a circuit board, but there's a popular hypothesis
that says it was taken from Poseidon's trident
as being able to use one port to connect to so many different devices
would make you as powerful as a Greek god. That seems like a stretch to me.
And I mean, yeah, USB is useful, but I really don't know if it's that exciting.
In any event, there doesn't appear to be any hard evidence to back the Poseidon theory up.
Where did it come from? That's what I wanna know. But one thing we can say
is that the large circle on the left is supposed to represent a PC,
while the smaller shapes on the right represent different kinds of peripherals.
So it does try to convey power in the form of versatility,
just probably without the mythology. Of course, there are many variations to the USB logo
that indicate what generation and speed the port is,
but we have an entire dedicated video explaining those, which we'll link to at the end.
But for now, we're gonna explain why the hard drive activity light
looks like a little can of soup. You may already know that the hard drive activity light
illuminates when one of your internal storage devices is being written to, or having data read from it.
In short, it lets you know that the drive is busy.
But why a cylinder? Well, the symbol comes from older mechanical hard drives,
which typically have multiple platters stacked inside,
forming a cylindrical shape. Back when we were all using mechanical HDDs,
knowing that the drive was busy was useful, since load times were long.
So an illuminated light would tell you that the drive was still working
and that your system hadn't frozen or run into an error.
But seeing as modern SSDs are much faster due to their lack of moving parts
and the fact that they can still perform reads and writes even if they're partly busy,
the drive activity light has become less common, though it's still around on quite a few modern systems.
Let's wrap things up with one you've seen not just on your PC, but just about everywhere else,
the power logo, which is a combination of a circle
that means off and a vertical line that means on.
The origins of the symbol go back to at least the 1940s,
inspired by binary code. Engineers would use a zero to indicate the off position
for a switch with one representing on.
In the 1970s, the International Electrotechnical Commission
decided to standardize the combined symbol as an indicator for a standby mode.
But in 2004, the IEEE published another standard
that just declared it to mean power. Of course, this symbol also appears on things
that don't operate using binary code like your blender,
assuming it doesn't have Alexa yet. Thanks for watching this video.
Like it if you liked it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Comment below with your suggestions for future videos.
And hey, go check out our episode where we explain the current state of USB naming.
It's fun out there.