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Hmm wasn't the "flower thing" called the Apple Key at some point? (I seem to remember being told this sometime in the mid 90s)

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There used to be an apple on the key as well as the command symbol. At least on my (very) old PPC iMac.

The Apple II had modifier keys called "open Apple" and "closed Apple", which occupied the same keys used for Command and Option on the Mac respectively. Many Apple keyboards printed both symbols.

The Apple IIe, technically. The original Apple II and Apple II+ [1] did not have them. Interestingly, I believe those keys were tied to the joystick buttons.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Apple_II...

Yep, definitely equivalent to the joystick buttons. I remember that clearly from my days of gaming on a IIGS.

The Apple logo was a label added to the Mac command key. The official symbol for the command key is a Bowen knot[1] (‘the flower symbol’). The Apple logo label was added in later Macintosh models, meant to aide in conversion from the Apple IIe, but the label remained longer than it should’ve. The original Apple II had none of these keys. Since 2007, Apple has removed the Apple logo label from the command key in its new keyboards.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowen_knot

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