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block_dagger
What UI uses circles with checkmarks in them as “OK” buttons? iOS 26. Facepalm.
aidos
More crucially, when did we lose the ability to click and hold on the first checkbox and then drag down the list to set them all the same way!

> 1982: Dragging through a field of check-boxes flips the state of the first and assigns the new state to all other boxes dragged through.

teddyh
ISTR a discussion in Tog on Interface on the design choices available, with visual examples. This seems to indicate that the choice was made there.
exiguus
When I see UI radio buttons, I often think about old radios, dishwashers, or washing machines, where you had two or three buttons aligned, and when you press one, the other(s) pop up (if they are already down).
1oooqooq
damn. stack overflow is gone for me. constantly logging me out (6 digits imaginary points) and showing me cloudflare annoyance almost every request. i guess i will just ask AIs trained on their content in the end.
pavlov
My hunch is that the square vs. circle convention is derived from paper forms.

The checkbox has been a common design element in forms for a long time. But people can of course tick off all boxes.

So when form designers needed to emphasize that you should only select one option, they often used a group of non-boxed options together with instruction copy that read “Circle one” (or similar).

The name “radio button” of course comes from physical buttons, but those were often square. So I think the specific circular shape is actually derived from circling an option on paper.

IAmBroom
> The name “radio button” of course comes from physical buttons, but those were often square.

It's just one opinion versus another, but in my experience early radios often had round buttons. I'm thinking of the kind of radios that preceded TVs.

Cassette decks certainly had rectangular "one choice only" buttons, but those came along decades later.