In the Atari TOS screenshots, other icons such as arrows are black on white background.
If the icons in upper left and right are also like that, then the upper left icon is actually four little triangles pointing inwards and not an X. The one on the right is four little triangles pointing outwards.
Atari ST users seemed to see it as an X -- so whether or not it was intentional on the part of the designer, it's not that hard to see how one of these users could have then translated that misconception to the Windows 95 GUI. It's all about perception...
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".
For what it's worth, I remember thinking that Windows95 was 'inspired' by NeXTStep when it was new. The NeXTStep machines themselves were pretty amazing for their late-80's origin. They had (and effectively used) 4-level 1-megapixel displays at a time when PC's were largely stuck at 640x480 or worse.
High screen resolutions were certainly possible on DOS PCs of the era, but since PCs were an open platform, developers would often target their software at the lowest common denominator of hardware, so outside of specific niche markets, they didn't typically produce DOS applications intended for high-resolution displays.
On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions. At 640x480, a VGA display contemporary to NeXTStep could display 16 colors, and at 320x200, 256 colors.
> On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions.
I think I'd characterize it a little differently: I remember games favoring 256-color modes (320x200, ModeX, etc.) and productivity applications favoring higher resolution. At the time, having both high bit depths and high resolution at the same time was asking too much of the hardware.
To put it in perspective, for a while, my desktop PC was an older generation 486/33. When I say 'older generation', what I mainly mean is that it was one of the last machines that lacked a local bus of any kind. This put the video board behind an ISA-bus, which was lucky to sustain 8MB/sec shared across all peripherals. Just looking at the bus, it couldn't update a full 1024x768 desktop at more than 10Hz. (320x200 was well over 100Hz).
I actually had a 486 DX50 in the early '90s, probably around the same time as you had your 486. It had an EISA bus - a 32-bit extended version of ISA - which was roughly contemporary with NeXTStep, and that supported about 20 MB/sec of usable bandwidth. I had a Diamond Speedstar video card which allowed Windows 3.1 to run very smoothly at 1024x768, 256 colors. It could, IIRC, work very well at 1280x1024 in 16 color mode, which would definitely have been comparable to anything NeXTStep had to offer, at least in the graphics department.
But when it came to productivity applications, they were probably more conservative than anything else on the PC platform. Even though I had this great video card and could run Windows 3.1 at high resolutions, I still exited to DOS to run WordPerfect in 80x25 text mode.
I actually recently came across a box of floppies that I used in middle school. Schoolwork that I did in 7th grade, in 1992, was all saved in WordPerfect 5.1 format. Stuff from 8th grade, 1993, was in Ami Pro format. So I'm fairly certain that I didn't start using any productivity software in Windows until about 1993.
The only graphical productivity application I remember using prior to that, under DOS, was Ventura Publisher, which, IIRC, actually used a custom version of the GEM GUI. But I ran that on my 8088 XT-clone in EGA mode.
There was a store in the basement of my college dorm that sold Intel-based NeXTStep machines. As befitting the OS and the time, they were all very high end machines: 486DX2/66, EISA/VLB, SCSI Disk, 32+MB, and all priced well over $5K. I remember drooling over the machines, but never had the cash to actually buy one. In 1995, I ultimately skipped from the ISA 486DX/33 to a PCI-based P5/100. The P5 was in a completely different league, of course.
Regarding software, my family and I went straight over to Windows productivity software with the release of Windows 3.0. The back story behind that was that our first printer (ca. 1986-7) was a Toshiba P321. This was a relatively new, 24-pin printer that was almost completely unsupported by the DOS software that we had. Windows 3.0 solved the support problem by giving us a single, good printer driver that worked for anything that could print through the Windows API. Between that, the protected mode memory manager, and support for 16 color 800x600, Windows was a compelling enough package that we immediately switched over almost entirely in 1990.
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.
The NextStep was way ahead on the curve for it's time (which is one of the reasons it failed).
I read an awesome piece a while back (and for the life of me I can't remember where) that said if you want to design for the future, estimate what computing power will be available in 10-15 years then buy that for your developers.
In that project I think they spent 186,000 per machine per user on average but they where designing software light years ahead of its time.
The NextStep didn't work out for a bunch of reasons cost been one of the major ones.
The other project wasn't trying to create a product they where trying to capture a sense of what hardware would be on every desk in 10 years and design for that, in effect skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is.
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.
Yes, it's different, but the article was trying argue that since "X" wasn't used in that context at the time it was introduced as a GUI element, the GUI element couldn't possibly be referencing the letter as a way of closing a program. While I agree that it's unlikely that the GUI "X" refers to a letter "X", that's not a valid argument for that position.
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.
Was this true in all of their games? I know early PlayStation games did use O for confirm and X for cancel - even a few years into its lifetime, this was the case as Final Fantasy VII is an obvious example.
Are you talking about the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII or the western version ? I have the Japanese version at home, I can check quickly if needed.
Both versions use O to accept and X to cancel. In the european FFVIII hovewer it was switched around. I think only early and rushed ports of japanese titles used O to accept on the playstation.
It's still true today, for instance dark souls on the ps3 uses O to accept on the japanese version and X on the western.
I'm still not sure why Sony did that by the way. While I'm willing to believe that X strongly means "bad/false" in japanese, I don't feel like it really means "accept" in western cultures as far as I know. When the playstation came out I don't think I would have had a lot of trouble accepting O for accept and X for cancel.
It depends on the version of the console. Japanese Playstation Portable and Vita have the O button as "accept" - but I have noticed that not all games respect that. European games played on a Japanese Vita will use X for accept, but on the Playstation Portable most games will use the system settings, rather than their own(there were exceptions, however).
> I don't think there is much relevance in the Japanese argument.
I wouldn't discount it; one instance where I'm pretty sure it was taken into account is the design of checkboxes (HTML and otherwise). At least in Germany a checkbox on paper would be marked with an x to represent true - but that would be utterly confusing to a Japanese person.
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS, released in 1989, was very popular indeed among Microsoft's customer base. And the first to have a (DOS) menu bar.
Open the File menu and 'x' is highlighted in red in the word 'Exit'.
In other words, prior to Windows 95's release, DOS programs had already set firmly in Microsoft's customers' minds that 'x' was for exit.
RISC OS (1987), used on Acorn computers in schools in the UK also used an 'X' close button on the windows. And look at what word is prominent in the bottom right of the desktop... exit
It seems that as soon as the word "exit" is prominent in your UI, 'x' is going to become associated with exit.
An enormous amount of Microsoft's target market were already using Word Perfect every day and seeing red 'x's for exit. So when they decided to put a button on the window bar, what else were they likely to pick?
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 =)
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.
I think check-for-yes, x-for-no is a fairly common convention in English as well, just not in tick-box forms. You do see it in feature-comparisons grids a lot, often with the check-mark colored green and the x colored red, to mix in another convention. Example: http://prezi.com/pricing/
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.
Interestingly the positioning of the two matches the common use of the nintendo buttons, A for confirm and B for cancel. The western Playstation games are really the exception to the rule.
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.
In Japan the actual convention is X=cancel/back and O=select/validate. Most japanese games follow that, because the Batsu/Maru meaning is obvious in Japanese with these symbols.
On the PS1, Final Fantasy VII was O=yes, X=no, and so were a bunch of the less mainstream JRPGS; also, Metal Gear Solid games were O=yes, X=no at least into the PS2 era.
I actually distinctly remember getting a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 and being confused why I couldn't start the game. Hitting any button on the splash screen would take you to the menu, and then hitting X from there would take you back to the splash screen. Having primarily played western games up to that point, it didn't even occur to me that another button could be used for 'confirm'.
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.
I thought the popular rumor was this was to help people with Nintendo 64 muscle memory, where the X corresponded (loosely) with where the A button was positioned, and the O corresponded to where the B was positioned.
It might be because of Sega's consoles, which were more popular in the US than they were in Japan, where Nintendo ruled.
The Genesis' button layout was A,B,C arranged in a diagonal from bottom-left to top-right. A was usually 'accept'. The Dreamcast had a diamond with A at the bottom and B to the right.
Nintendo's Famicom buttons read A,B from right-to-left, and that trend continued with the Super Famicom's diamond, which had A to the right and B at te bottom. The N64 had a weird layout, but again B was to the left of A.
Sony probably focus tested the pad in the US and found that players were more used to Sega's layout.
AFAIK it came close, but the SNES launched later in the US and the Genesis sold more units. As opposed to Japan where the Genesis didn't really get a foothold.
As I said in another comment, almost every Megadrive game I've played lets you use both A and C for accept in menus, so you could use whichever orientation you were more comfortable with. I think anyone who started with Nintendo consoles would instinctually rest their thumb between B and C.
My guess is that Sony thought that X and O wouldn't have as obvious connotations outside of Japan, and figured that people would assume the button closest to the player (X) would be the OK button. In practice, I have found that people with very little exposure to Japanese culture still have the same association with X and O in their heads and get confused when using Playstations ("you press X to accept???"), so I'll curse Sony forever for this stupid regional change.
I always thought the reason for the switch was down to driving games, where X is a more natural fit for 'accelerate'. Also, X to me is a more 'definitive action' symbol compared to O, make of that what you will.
This is almost certainly a result of intense focus testing, so I don't think it would be a design choice by Sony based on cultural differences so much as an observation of user comfort and expectations.
That's not to say that those expectations weren't due to cultural differences.
IMO one of the most short-sighted decision made Sony Entertainment EU/US. They had a standard and decided to change it just for the sake of changing it.
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.
Makes sense to me. We have scan sheets and forms with empty bubbles and boxes meaning, "not this one," and we put a check mark, X, or other mark in them to indicate our selection.
The XBox controller is a clone of the Dreamcast controller. If you go back even further to the Megadrive, it had 6 buttons (on advanced controllers) with two rows of buttons - xyz and ABC arrayed from left to right.
When the Playstation 1 was released, the two consoles consumers could have been familiar with in the west were Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive. SNES had the familiar ABXY, but mirrored with AX on the right. It used A for yes and B for no. The Megadrive had the aforementioned ABCxyz and also used A for yes and B for no. Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive), while the other had the bottom button for no and the one on the right for yes (SNES).
So I doubt SONY copied the competition for their decision to swap the yes/no buttons.
>SNES had the familiar ABXY, but mirrored with AX on the right.
Those of us that grew up with Nintendo consoles would say that B on the left of A is the natural order of things ;)
>Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive)
Actually, almost every Megadrive game I've played lets you use both A and C for accept in menus, so you could use whichever orientation you were more comfortable with.
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.
Lots of banner ads make the close symbol e.g. the second from right (swap maximize and close) or swap the functions... thus exploiting muscle memory of people to open the ad :/
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.
That's actually not such a bad idea. I have just a single pixel border around the left/right/bottom at the moment, just so I can see the edge of overlapping terminal windows. I have to say I wouldn't miss the titlebar much either.
If you notice, there's some space left between the maximise and close, so they're more like _[]...X
Plus, you can maximise/restore by double-clicking the titlebar which is a larger target and I expect most users learn that and almost never touch the actual button.
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.
I'd describe that as "verbing" it rather than "punning" it. The verb makes sense too, when you take keyboard short cuts into account. A very common short cut to exit a program (in Windows at least) is File->Exit, which translates to `Alt+F, X` so you do, in fact, "X it".
If ex is not your favorite editor, use EX<ESC><ESC> (at least, that is what I think Wikipedia claims. I'm sure any decent TECO user never exits their editor, browsing the web in a browser macro)
[I also checked ed and edlin. They had two commands for exiting: w writes and exits, q quits]
Wow great article. I don't agree with his conclusion that it came from Japan. But it's as good a reason as any I suppose.
One quick thing, IIR Windows 2.0 and 3.0, the '-' button in the upper left wasn't "close". It was a small menu that happened to have close as an option.
You could double-click it to close, though. And of course the menu (and the double-click-to-close functionality) is still there, it's just that the [-] icon was replaced with the application's own icon. So contrary to the article, the close button was added in Win95, all the other elements are still there.
When we have completed a todo task we "cross it" to mark it done. i would say the x to close is intended to represent a "crossing out" not the letter x. It is pressed to signify a task has been completed.
My thoughts exactly. Not being from exactly a Western culture (I'm Russian) I always saw the X not as a letter but rather as a cross (Russians say "click the cross to close the window"), a sign of deleting or cancelling something by crossing it out. It made perfect sense so I never even thought there could be other explanations. All because in our language there is no X-exit connection.
That's RISC OS 3, which is several years later. Arthur already had the X in 1987, see for example http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/18941/mobile-opt-out.php . (Later than the 1985 find in Atari OS of the original article, but still interesting.)
As far as I know, Acorn's RISC OS also pioneered the icon bar and the context menu.
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.
If you double-click it, it closes the application. It was converted from a picture of a spacebar to the application's icon, but still functions the same way.
Some time ago I was stunned discovering how many Windows users had no idea that double-clicking [-] closes the window. I bet that was the main reason for introducing separate close button.
> It was the "Control Box", a menu icon. AFAIK it's still there, just invisible -- hit alt+space to open it.
Still there in Windows 7. It's visible in some applications (e.g., PowerShell) but not others; ALT+SPACE seems to open it consistently whether it's visible or not.
My hazy memory is that the control box was retained for accessibility and for the many users trained to use it on Windows 3.1.
Control box was replaced by window icon itself and even on Windows 7 seems to work the same way, double clicking on window's icon closes the window (I had to test that).
Windows 95 was the first time I remember using it, and I have been using PC's since TRS model 80. It makes sense, X means "stop" in most cases and stop essentially means close or terminate a process / app.
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.
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.
Not to mention web sites that use a graphical icon in the background instead of a textual one or lack a fallback X on pop up windows. I'm forever groping around trying to shut these overlays in the dark.
Far from exclusive to them though, and it seems to be (/have been?) a very common thing for IM clients to do. I can live with it as long as the devs put in the appropriate options for the behavior you want, but I'm not happy about it.
I sort of understand the point for IM client, that people won't close it unintentionally. But that is solved by showing a dialog asking do you want to close. Breaking Alt+F4's functionality is such an abomination that it is impossible to understand the thought process behind the decision.
Huh? I thought the point for an IM client is that you don't need a window anywhere, if you have the icon down there. So you can close the main window, or you can separately quit the application.
Minimize puts your window in the taskbar whereas X closes the window (not in the taskbar anymore), but whether it also closes the program or not at the same time is up to the program (and ideally should be configurable). That's how I understand it at least.
BTW: In Skype 6.18.59.106 there is an option for "Keep Skype in the taskbar while I'm signed in." When it is unchecked, minimize and X behaves as you said.
In case of Spotify, that window is the application. And the only window that the application has. Hitting X in that window should quit the application IMO.
That's not standard. If it's a one-window app, such as Skype, it should close the app. BareTorrent is also sort of a daemon process (where you often want it to live in the systray), and it follows standards. Minimize will put it in the system tray and close actually closes it. It's standard and feels intuitive.
I don't think so - I find this very subjective - I've always assumed that X just closes the window, even if it's a single window app. This is consistent, just some applications happen to also run in the background.
A large number [citation needed] of Windows apps that have done this are things that most users would want to run in the background, primarily things like instant messaging clients, music players, and daemon-y programs (torrents come to mind).
There's frequently a setting to configure if it truly closes or not, but it's not usually there for more mass-market targeted apps (death by settings and configuration options to support being the likely cause).
That's because Microsoft's guidelines say not to leave icons in the notification area any more for running apps. For skype and friends, the behaviour has always been to keep running even after the last window is closed, but keep an icon in the notification area (a.k.a. systray).
It does mess with everybody's expectations of closing the last window freeing space on the taskbar though.
203 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadIf the icons in upper left and right are also like that, then the upper left icon is actually four little triangles pointing inwards and not an X. The one on the right is four little triangles pointing outwards.
(Or it could be an X)
NextStep 0.8, '88 vintage.
http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11menu.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS#mediaviewer/File:ST_D...
Looks pretty X-like. It seems GEM itself was licensed from Digital Research but their GEM didn't use X.
Edit: Fixed DEC to DR, as pointed out by reply comment below.
On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions. At 640x480, a VGA display contemporary to NeXTStep could display 16 colors, and at 320x200, 256 colors.
I think I'd characterize it a little differently: I remember games favoring 256-color modes (320x200, ModeX, etc.) and productivity applications favoring higher resolution. At the time, having both high bit depths and high resolution at the same time was asking too much of the hardware.
To put it in perspective, for a while, my desktop PC was an older generation 486/33. When I say 'older generation', what I mainly mean is that it was one of the last machines that lacked a local bus of any kind. This put the video board behind an ISA-bus, which was lucky to sustain 8MB/sec shared across all peripherals. Just looking at the bus, it couldn't update a full 1024x768 desktop at more than 10Hz. (320x200 was well over 100Hz).
But when it came to productivity applications, they were probably more conservative than anything else on the PC platform. Even though I had this great video card and could run Windows 3.1 at high resolutions, I still exited to DOS to run WordPerfect in 80x25 text mode.
I actually recently came across a box of floppies that I used in middle school. Schoolwork that I did in 7th grade, in 1992, was all saved in WordPerfect 5.1 format. Stuff from 8th grade, 1993, was in Ami Pro format. So I'm fairly certain that I didn't start using any productivity software in Windows until about 1993.
The only graphical productivity application I remember using prior to that, under DOS, was Ventura Publisher, which, IIRC, actually used a custom version of the GEM GUI. But I ran that on my 8088 XT-clone in EGA mode.
Regarding software, my family and I went straight over to Windows productivity software with the release of Windows 3.0. The back story behind that was that our first printer (ca. 1986-7) was a Toshiba P321. This was a relatively new, 24-pin printer that was almost completely unsupported by the DOS software that we had. Windows 3.0 solved the support problem by giving us a single, good printer driver that worked for anything that could print through the Windows API. Between that, the protected mode memory manager, and support for 16 color 800x600, Windows was a compelling enough package that we immediately switched over almost entirely in 1990.
Those were fun times!
I read an awesome piece a while back (and for the life of me I can't remember where) that said if you want to design for the future, estimate what computing power will be available in 10-15 years then buy that for your developers.
In that project I think they spent 186,000 per machine per user on average but they where designing software light years ahead of its time.
The other project wasn't trying to create a product they where trying to capture a sense of what hardware would be on every desk in 10 years and design for that, in effect skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is.
I wish I could remember where I read it :|.
Edit: seems Wordstar used X too, probably starting in 1978.
To answer your question, "x" (short for eXit) was available in vi from the beginning:
ZZ Exits the editor. (Same as :xCR)
Source: Bill Joy's "An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi" http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/vi/vi_editor__bill_joy.pdf
Edit: and thanks for the vi ref.
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!
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.
It's still true today, for instance dark souls on the ps3 uses O to accept on the japanese version and X on the western.
I'm still not sure why Sony did that by the way. While I'm willing to believe that X strongly means "bad/false" in japanese, I don't feel like it really means "accept" in western cultures as far as I know. When the playstation came out I don't think I would have had a lot of trouble accepting O for accept and X for cancel.
I wouldn't discount it; one instance where I'm pretty sure it was taken into account is the design of checkboxes (HTML and otherwise). At least in Germany a checkbox on paper would be marked with an x to represent true - but that would be utterly confusing to a Japanese person.
Open the File menu and 'x' is highlighted in red in the word 'Exit'.
In other words, prior to Windows 95's release, DOS programs had already set firmly in Microsoft's customers' minds that 'x' was for exit.
RISC OS (1987), used on Acorn computers in schools in the UK also used an 'X' close button on the windows. And look at what word is prominent in the bottom right of the desktop... exit
http://www.dasmirnov.net/media/blogs/blog/bigarthur.gif
It seems that as soon as the word "exit" is prominent in your UI, 'x' is going to become associated with exit.
An enormous amount of Microsoft's target market were already using Word Perfect every day and seeing red 'x's for exit. So when they decided to put a button on the window bar, what else were they likely to pick?
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 =)
http://cache1.asset-cache.net/gc/88203236-calendar-with-date...
Or crossing-out an item to "delete" it on the page?
example : final fantasy 7 control bindings. http://www.cavesofnarshe.com/ff7/buttons.php
[edited]
The Genesis' button layout was A,B,C arranged in a diagonal from bottom-left to top-right. A was usually 'accept'. The Dreamcast had a diamond with A at the bottom and B to the right.
Nintendo's Famicom buttons read A,B from right-to-left, and that trend continued with the Super Famicom's diamond, which had A to the right and B at te bottom. The N64 had a weird layout, but again B was to the left of A.
Sony probably focus tested the pad in the US and found that players were more used to Sega's layout.
My guess is that Sony thought that X and O wouldn't have as obvious connotations outside of Japan, and figured that people would assume the button closest to the player (X) would be the OK button. In practice, I have found that people with very little exposure to Japanese culture still have the same association with X and O in their heads and get confused when using Playstations ("you press X to accept???"), so I'll curse Sony forever for this stupid regional change.
That's not to say that those expectations weren't due to cultural differences.
I'd be curious to know what caused that convention to change in the west.
The XBox controller has a swapped A/B pair and uses A confirm B cancel.
When the Playstation 1 was released, the two consoles consumers could have been familiar with in the west were Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive. SNES had the familiar ABXY, but mirrored with AX on the right. It used A for yes and B for no. The Megadrive had the aforementioned ABCxyz and also used A for yes and B for no. Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive), while the other had the bottom button for no and the one on the right for yes (SNES).
So I doubt SONY copied the competition for their decision to swap the yes/no buttons.
Those of us that grew up with Nintendo consoles would say that B on the left of A is the natural order of things ;)
>Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive)
Actually, almost every Megadrive game I've played lets you use both A and C for accept in menus, so you could use whichever orientation you were more comfortable with.
> I doubt SONY copied the competition
IIRC this wasn't decided by SONY, each game used its own variation until a standard was created organically.
Edit: According to etymonline.com, crossing things out dates to at lease mid 15th century: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Cross
"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.
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.
Maybe it's because I was used to Windows 3.11, where you had to actually double-click the [-] button to exit an application.
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 really wish I could do the same on Mac.
Plus, you can maximise/restore by double-clicking the titlebar which is a larger target and I expect most users learn that and almost never touch the actual button.
If ex is not your favorite editor, use EX<ESC><ESC> (at least, that is what I think Wikipedia claims. I'm sure any decent TECO user never exits their editor, browsing the web in a browser macro)
[I also checked ed and edlin. They had two commands for exiting: w writes and exits, q quits]
One quick thing, IIR Windows 2.0 and 3.0, the '-' button in the upper left wasn't "close". It was a small menu that happened to have close as an option.
edit - Here's Arthur, the precursor to RiscOS in ~ 1986 - http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/10... - It has nice x icons.
Until the NewLook sprite set, it looks more like a weird flower shape than an X.
Here it is with NewLook: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/riscos...
Clearly now an X.
As far as I know, Acorn's RISC OS also pioneered the icon bar and the context menu.
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.
Still there in Windows 7. It's visible in some applications (e.g., PowerShell) but not others; ALT+SPACE seems to open it consistently whether it's visible or not.
My hazy memory is that the control box was retained for accessibility and for the many users trained to use it on Windows 3.1.
I did think very briefly that it was something to do with X, then thought X was a variable as in "$X to close".
I'm trying to think of any cases where this is true. Stop signs aren't crosses, they have a special shape.
[1] http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
That was one of the old differences between Windows and OS X behavior (or app-centric vs window-centric).
If you're reffering to Windows, then X usually closed the app too.
I think his point is the X closes the window, and many, but not all, Windows applications also choose to quit when their (last) window is closed.
There's frequently a setting to configure if it truly closes or not, but it's not usually there for more mass-market targeted apps (death by settings and configuration options to support being the likely cause).
It does mess with everybody's expectations of closing the last window freeing space on the taskbar though.