As an Atari ST user from 1985 to roughly 1993, I wasn't expecting the author would actually mention GEM/TOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I scrolled down and, lo, there it is.
That said, since the "X" in this case is white on a black background, I always interpreted the icon as four arrows pointing inward to indicate a shrinking/disappearing motion. In fact, when you closed a window, GEM would play an (inelegant) animation akin to the Macintosh of the time, composed of a sequence of boxes first shrinking from the size of the window to a small box and then shuffling that off to the top left of the screen.
As bemmu points out, the maximize button (at the top right in a GEM/TOS window) is four arrows pointing outward. Incidentally, GEM did not have a notion of "minimize."
Put another way, although I find the Japanese inspiration argument interesting, I don't think there's a whole lot to it. I think it's a fun coincidence.
In any event, thank you for the trip down memory lane and for the fun screen grabs!
I don't think there is much relevance in the Japanese argument. One funny detail is that Sony actually inverted in their games the meaning of Round and X for western markets -> making X act as "validate" and Round as "Back/Cancel", the exact opposite of what they do in Japan.
As for "X being a true icon", I don't know. For me, it could stand as well as an abbreviation for "eXit" -> X.
The AmigaOS Workbench used (and still uses) a dot instead of a X. It's just a matter of conventions.
I always saw it as an X, and when I used to tutor people on the ST (it was very popular where I grew up) I would refer to it as an X. It's more than possible that someone who used the ST, who saw it at as X, then suggested using an X as the close icon on Windows 95.
So the Japanese 'connection' may not be valid, but the notion that someone saw the GEMTOS symbol as an X and then influenced Windows 95 is not that far-fetched...
I was also really surprised (and glad) that the ST even got a look-in though =)
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar) WordStar was released in 1978. Which moves the date back to at least 1978 to use X for exit.
However, there is possibly a very simple explanation that the blog posting overlooked. In text menu's, such as WordStar's, which were quite common for a lot of software from that era, using the word "Exit" to mean "leave this program/application" was also common. When one goes looking for a single character memonic for "Exit" to build in as a keystroke to activate the "Exit" command from the menu, one has four choices: [e] [x] [i] [t]
Since [x] is an uncommon letter, while e, i, t, are more common, and therefore more likely to be used for triggering other commands in the menu(s), choosing [x] to mean exit meant that the same character could likely be used as a universal "leave this menu" command key across all the menus.
Which would then lead to the common _F_ile->E_x_it command accelerators in drop down style menus (whether in a GUI or in a text menuing system). [x] was unlikely to have been used for the keyboard accelerator for other entries in the "file" menu, so picking e[x]it was a safe choice.
It is not a far reach from _F_ile->E_x_it using [x] as its accelerator key to labeling the title bar button that performs the same function with an X as well, to take advantage of whatever familiarity users might have with the drop down menu accelerators
First, it's properly ^K X, as the ^K prefix subcommands block/file actions, as written by Rob Barnaby into all the WordStar versions starting with CP/M.
Second, ^KX as 'exit' means to save the latest revisions out to file before quitting, while ^KQ, 'quit', means to abandon the revisions. You might get a confirmation dialog and a chance to change your mind before you're dumped back to the commandline.
Current-convention iconic close-window behavior more closely emulates the latter.
Not to mention the letter X sounds like the word "exit," or "ex it." In this way using X as a keyboard command to represent exit might be distinct from the way OP posits X to represent batsu (false, bad, wrong or attack).
I came to post the same thing... I had NeXT cube serial number 32 on my desk at Los Alamos as an intern back in '88 running NextStep 0.8 and clearly remember how amazing the machine was. We got the first 50 of the line (I think) because a guy in the Laboratory was a friend of Jobs, and Jobs wanted to promote the box as the perfect research tool thanks to Mathematica and the like.
Windows 95 looks quite similar to NeXTSTEP, with very similar gray window decorations and beveled (might be the wrong word) borders and buttons. It could be a design of times kind of thing, but to me it looks very "inspired".
Interesting, but the connection to symbols from Japan seems a bit dubious (or at least not very recent). The term "cross out", and hence the use of an "x" to indicate negating something, seems to have been in common use in English since at least the 1920s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cross+out
Also, it could have come from 'exit'. I've seen some text based programs use an 'x' key-press to activate a program 'exit', although I'm not sure of the chronology of its use.
Everyone remembers being told at school from a very early age to "cross out" things you dont want any more (such as writing the wrong word/spelling, getting the sum wrong etc). At least in western cultures anyway, this seems fairly universal.
Seems to me to be a very easy semantic jump to go from "disregard this mistake" on paper to "disregard this thing I am looking at" on computer screens.
That's a really interesting idea, that had never occured to me.
Probably because I'm pretty aware of the close-doors button actually looking like >|< on typical elevators. The vertical line, I guess, represents the opening.
In this early demo (Codename: Chicago), the minimize and maximize buttons have been redesigned, but the close button remains the same, and to the left as before.
I wonder where the author got the idea that the [-] button at the top-left was a close icon. It was the "Control Box", a menu icon. AFAIK it's still there, just invisible -- hit alt+space to open it.
I worked at Atari, on the Atari ST (writing a bunch of systems-level code). My cow-orkers were working closely with DRI to port GEM to the ST hardware. GEM wasn't done yet, and much of the engineering effort there was helping DRI finish it up. A lot of stuff was done on the Atari side of the fence that never made it back to the DRI sources.
I can categorically state that there wasn't any Japanese influence on that "X".
If anything, it was programmer art. We Atari folks were mostly video-game programmers, with some sense of design, and a lot of the stuff that was coming out of DRI was pretty ugly. So it probably got tweaked late a night until it "looked pretty" and wasn't revisited (the ST was started and shipped in about 10 months, so we were in kind of a hurry).
As the article shows, the close button on MacOS classic was basically an empty box, but on mousing down on that box, it transformed into something that looks a bit like an x. I'm basing this on what I can see from using [1], but from my possibly inaccurate recollection of using the real thing in the 80s and 90s, some versions of MacOS had an even more "x like" mouse down image on the close button.
Yeah, I was remembering this too. Of course, it also kind of felt like you'd "selected" the box. In fact, I think early checkboxes had x in them on Mac, didn't they? So it might have been a bit of a coincidence ... or an inspiration.
I always found it interesting that Sony swapped the X and O buttons for the western Playstation market. In Japan X (batsu) does mean "back" or "no", whereas elsewhere it is reversed.
They mention X and O on the PS controller but usually in games O is for no and X is for yes. Completely opposite of the batsu/maru, incorrent/correct they were discussing.
It seems like Sony, being a Japanese company, originally intended for O to represent yes, and X to represent no. If you look at a lot of early PlayStation games, or most modern games released in Japan, that convention is apparent. The O and X buttons on the PlayStation controller even match the placement of A and B buttons on Nintendo's controllers, providing a clear analogue between the two.
I'd be curious to know what caused that convention to change in the west.
In Japanese variants, he is correct. When Sony westernized the playstation controller, the O and X functionality was flipped.
Sony is yet to comment on the reasons why.
In Japan they're sometimes switched. That is to say, I've worked on PS3 games where the US SKU had X=accept, O=back but the Japanese SKU had X=back, O=accept.
No 'x' to close vi? Was that not always there? I've certainly been using it as long as I can remember; that's not to say it's always been there though - does anyone know when it was first available?
Edit: seems Wordstar used X too, probably starting in 1978.
Too bad, that popular Windows applications like Skype and Spotify have gone against this and made "X to minimize". And their making of Alt+F4 also to minimize drives me nuts.
NeXT had X buttons to close windows before windows 95, with a very similar look to to win 95 window button styles too. I think NeXTStep 1.0 was in 1989 or thereabouts.
I recall being mildly shocked when Windows 95 came out with the the [x] button. I don't know why, but I thought that it was somewhat dangerous to allow users to quickly exit an application like this.
Maybe it's because I was used to Windows 3.11, where you had to actually double-click the [-] button to exit an application.
Agreed. But more to the point, I'd like to know what idiot decided it would be great to put a close button right next to the maximise and minimise buttons. It's a disaster just waiting for a mis-click. Since Win95, everyone else has copied this particular feature.
First thing I do whenever I do a new Linux install is put the close button on its own on the left where it belongs.
I still occasionally double click where the [-] used to be, which still works. Even longtime Windows users have given me weird looks at this. They are surprised it does something.
[+] [-] bhauer|11 years ago|reply
That said, since the "X" in this case is white on a black background, I always interpreted the icon as four arrows pointing inward to indicate a shrinking/disappearing motion. In fact, when you closed a window, GEM would play an (inelegant) animation akin to the Macintosh of the time, composed of a sequence of boxes first shrinking from the size of the window to a small box and then shuffling that off to the top left of the screen.
As bemmu points out, the maximize button (at the top right in a GEM/TOS window) is four arrows pointing outward. Incidentally, GEM did not have a notion of "minimize."
Put another way, although I find the Japanese inspiration argument interesting, I don't think there's a whole lot to it. I think it's a fun coincidence.
In any event, thank you for the trip down memory lane and for the fun screen grabs!
[+] [-] ekianjo|11 years ago|reply
As for "X being a true icon", I don't know. For me, it could stand as well as an abbreviation for "eXit" -> X.
The AmigaOS Workbench used (and still uses) a dot instead of a X. It's just a matter of conventions.
[+] [-] empressplay|11 years ago|reply
So the Japanese 'connection' may not be valid, but the notion that someone saw the GEMTOS symbol as an X and then influenced Windows 95 is not that far-fetched...
I was also really surprised (and glad) that the ST even got a look-in though =)
[+] [-] pwg|11 years ago|reply
WordStar: Used "X" to Exit to system in its main menu (https://www.flickr.com/photos/markgregory/6946218793/?rb=1) - I do not know the revision shown in the screen shot.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar) WordStar was released in 1978. Which moves the date back to at least 1978 to use X for exit.
However, there is possibly a very simple explanation that the blog posting overlooked. In text menu's, such as WordStar's, which were quite common for a lot of software from that era, using the word "Exit" to mean "leave this program/application" was also common. When one goes looking for a single character memonic for "Exit" to build in as a keystroke to activate the "Exit" command from the menu, one has four choices: [e] [x] [i] [t]
Since [x] is an uncommon letter, while e, i, t, are more common, and therefore more likely to be used for triggering other commands in the menu(s), choosing [x] to mean exit meant that the same character could likely be used as a universal "leave this menu" command key across all the menus.
Which would then lead to the common _F_ile->E_x_it command accelerators in drop down style menus (whether in a GUI or in a text menuing system). [x] was unlikely to have been used for the keyboard accelerator for other entries in the "file" menu, so picking e[x]it was a safe choice.
It is not a far reach from _F_ile->E_x_it using [x] as its accelerator key to labeling the title bar button that performs the same function with an X as well, to take advantage of whatever familiarity users might have with the drop down menu accelerators
[+] [-] crb3|11 years ago|reply
First, it's properly ^K X, as the ^K prefix subcommands block/file actions, as written by Rob Barnaby into all the WordStar versions starting with CP/M.
Second, ^KX as 'exit' means to save the latest revisions out to file before quitting, while ^KQ, 'quit', means to abandon the revisions. You might get a confirmation dialog and a chance to change your mind before you're dumped back to the commandline.
Current-convention iconic close-window behavior more closely emulates the latter.
[+] [-] hammock|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autokad|11 years ago|reply
http://www.mysundial.ca/tsp/images/qbasic_screen_2.gif
[+] [-] glurgh|11 years ago|reply
NextStep 0.8, '88 vintage.
[+] [-] peapicker|11 years ago|reply
Those were fun times!
[+] [-] linuxlizard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedlaw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empressplay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrowne|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbw1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nardi|11 years ago|reply
Edit: According to etymonline.com, crossing things out dates to at lease mid 15th century: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Cross
[+] [-] renlo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|11 years ago|reply
Everyone remembers being told at school from a very early age to "cross out" things you dont want any more (such as writing the wrong word/spelling, getting the sum wrong etc). At least in western cultures anyway, this seems fairly universal.
Seems to me to be a very easy semantic jump to go from "disregard this mistake" on paper to "disregard this thing I am looking at" on computer screens.
[+] [-] gnarbarian|11 years ago|reply
"X marks the spot"
Checking a box to indictate your selection on a form or ballot.
I can't think of any more off the top of my head.
[+] [-] chippy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ape4|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lunchbox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itazula|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seszett|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unwind|11 years ago|reply
Probably because I'm pretty aware of the close-doors button actually looking like >|< on typical elevators. The vertical line, I guess, represents the opening.
See for instance https://www.google.com/search?q=elevator+close+button&tbm=is....
[+] [-] kybernetikos|11 years ago|reply
http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/arthur2.gif
[+] [-] lotsofmangos|11 years ago|reply
edit - Here's Arthur, the precursor to RiscOS in ~ 1986 - http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/10... - It has nice x icons.
[+] [-] literalusername|11 years ago|reply
I wonder where the author got the idea that the [-] button at the top-left was a close icon. It was the "Control Box", a menu icon. AFAIK it's still there, just invisible -- hit alt+space to open it.
Disclaimer: I'm currently unable to test that.
[+] [-] kabdib|11 years ago|reply
I can categorically state that there wasn't any Japanese influence on that "X".
If anything, it was programmer art. We Atari folks were mostly video-game programmers, with some sense of design, and a lot of the stuff that was coming out of DRI was pretty ugly. So it probably got tweaked late a night until it "looked pretty" and wasn't revisited (the ST was started and shipped in about 10 months, so we were in kind of a hurry).
[+] [-] iachimoe|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
[+] [-] lstamour|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macrael|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batiudrami|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xsace|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacesword|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _frog|11 years ago|reply
I'd be curious to know what caused that convention to change in the west.
[+] [-] ntSean|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teamonkey|11 years ago|reply
[edited]
[+] [-] chewxy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwp90|11 years ago|reply
Edit: seems Wordstar used X too, probably starting in 1978.
[+] [-] jzzskijj|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluthru|11 years ago|reply
http://cache1.asset-cache.net/gc/88203236-calendar-with-date...
Or crossing-out an item to "delete" it on the page?
[+] [-] quux|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panzi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kentosi|11 years ago|reply
Maybe it's because I was used to Windows 3.11, where you had to actually double-click the [-] button to exit an application.
[+] [-] mnw21cam|11 years ago|reply
First thing I do whenever I do a new Linux install is put the close button on its own on the left where it belongs.
[+] [-] asveikau|11 years ago|reply