GoKawiilThe relationship between keyboard manufacturers and standards bodies in various countries is so complex I barely understand a snippet of it.
The most famous example must be the 1990s PowerBooks, which had a beige variant for Germany and Germany only, to conform with local laws that prescribed and enforced specific color and contrast combinations for keyboards, in order to avoid glare and attendant ergonomic problems for terminal operators in the decades before. (It wasn’t just Apple. ThinkPads did the same.)
(I know. Jump scare!)
But you’ll understand that what caught more of my attention was an obscure variant of keyboards for (parts of?) Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The white 2003 keyboard might be my favourite of Apple’s keyboard design, instantly recognizable in either the American version (more words), or the European one (more symbols):
There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard, which famously kept Control where older terminals had it – to, no doubt, delight of Japan’s programmers:
These are the three well-known layout standards. The one for Canada followed Europe, but only to a point. The layout was the same, but the symbols weren’t:
Here’s an alternate view of the European and Canadian keyboards, and you can see that the latter one introduces different, unique symbols for Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock…
…and even goes as far as Esc. (The Esc symbol is roughly the same you see worldwide, but for some reason, Apple always shied away from putting it on even symbol-friendly keyboards – even though frustratingly it’s being used in macOS menus in all the locales.)
The story repeats itself in the middle of the keyboard. Here are, again, the US and European editions…
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