Think Retro: Open Apple, closed Apple<article>
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You can date an Apple user as accurately as a botanist counting rings to date a tree, and you don’t even have to cut them in half first.</p><p>
What you do is work out what they call the Mac’s secondary modifier key. This is trickier to do than you might think, as evidenced by how I had to come up with that awkward description rather than name it myself and so skew your response.</p><p>
To a modern Mac user, you see, it’s the Alt key. To a more seasoned veteran, it’s Option, and to the true keepers of the flame, it’s the Closed Apple key.</p><p>
It’s always fun, incidentally, watching people get one-upped when they try to pull the Mac old-timer card. You know the kind of thing I mean; someone posts to a forum saying that while they know how to type an acute accent on a Mac by tapping Alt-E, they’d like to know how to get an umlaut. The reply comes that they should tap Alt-U, and by the way it’s not actually called the Alt key, it’s called Option. But then, as sure as night follows day, it’s followed by someone pointing out that it was actually originally called the Closed Apple key and by the way that diacritical mark was originally called a diæresis not an umlaut, followed by the second guy pointing out that the original poster had asked about typing the symbol on a Mac and since the Closed Apple convention predated the Macintosh he was
quite right to have said it was originally called Option, and so on and so on until the heat death of the universe. I do love a pedant; they’re my people.</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/2867994/think-retro-open-apple-closed-apple.html#jump">To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>
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Think Retro: Open Apple, closed Apple
