Heikki Lotvonen at Glyph Drawing Club Blog posted Why is there a “small house” inIBM’s Code page 437?, which is not really in my wheelhouse, but since Kattullus at MetaFilter (where I got the link) said “This is an extremely satisfying read because it sets out a mystery, and then comes to a conclusion that’s simultaneously obvious, and one I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years of thinking just about that one thing,” I couldn’t resist clicking through; it is indeed a satisfying read, and the conclusion resonates with something I like to emphasize here at LH:
The consistent inconsistencies in IBM’s technical documentations, fonts, and registries, sounds like a classic case of miscommunication between the different departments of IBM. Did the font’s designers intend 0x7F to be a house, but the engineers interpreted it as a delta, mislabeling it in the System BIOS? Or did the designers intend it to be delta, but the botched rendering made it look like a house, and publications like the IBM BASIC Manual perpetuated the wrong interpretation until IBM decided to make it official in the registry? Or what? There is no clear answer.
Whether IBM meant 0x7F to be a delta, or a house, remains a mystery. But it doesn’t really matter. What the house character looks like, is, after all, just a matter of interpretation. The legacy of CP437 is not defined by IBM’s intentions, but by all the different ways designers, programmers, ASCII artists and other users adopted it. It is delta and house, but also rocket, players ammo, gun, spike, energizer, or whatever else we want it to be. As IBM engineer Charles E. Mackenzie observes in Coded Character Sets, History and Development:
“There is an aspect of human nature which surfaces in data processing. Experience has shown that if graphics are provided on a computing system, they will be used in one way or another by customers, even if they have no intrinsic meaning.”[11]
This is probably best exemplified by how the house character is used in PC ASCII art. In the hands of ASCII artists, the character goes beyond meaning and returns to pure form, demonstrating that there is no shape that has an “intrinsic” meaning, until we give them meaning.
L’arbitraire du signe, baby!
God brought every glyph unto Adam, to see what he would mean thereby; and whatsoever Adam meant by every glyph, that was the meaning thereof.
ISTR it was an approximation, in the limited pixel space, of ⌫? It was originally “rubout” in paper tape.
“Theory #2: It’s related to backspace
Another “hunch” was suggested by VileR. He entertained the idea that the house character itself was associated with the action of deleting text, or related to the backspace symbol ⌫ (U+232B). If you rotate ⌫ 90˚ clockwise, you do get a house ⌂ (with an × in it). It’s an interesting idea, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to support this claim either.”
What supports that claim is that it’s the same 7-bit pattern as “rubout” on paper tape.
Interesting! Nice to hear from someone who actually knows about this stuff (which I obviously don’t).
Some further historical background on the equivalence of Rubout and Delete (0x7F), and conflation with Backspace (0x08), can be found in Wikipedia’s ASCII entry.
Interesting use of ⌂ in this article.
The article is by Ghil’ad Zuckermann, and his examples are all Modern Hebrew (or as he says, “Revived Hebrew, henceforth Israeli”).
Regular Hatters will of course recognize that he has appeared multiple times on languagehat before.
Regarding the original topic — I have a faint memory that sometime in the late 1980s-early 1990s, I found the ROM reference for the PC (or PC clones) I was working with, and wrote a banner program that would get the bit pattern of the character from the ROM, and print out a large glyph using spaces for the binary zeros and some other character (Maybe the large block? An asterisk? I forget) for the binary ones. I may have printed the DEL character, but I really don’t remember. I was more interested in letters.
I am also reminded that we had a brief subthread about the reverse delta/nabla/anadelta character, “∇”.
https://languagehat.com/undeciphered-inscription/#comment-4328146