There’s a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM’s infamous character set Code Page 437. “Small house”—that’s the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for “Delete” (DEL) should logically exist. It’s cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things?

Glyph Drawing Club dives into this fascinating subject:

Released in 1981, the IBM Personal Computer (PC) launched IBM’s first microcomputer model line. Alongside it, they introduced an 8-bit character set, which later became known as Code Page 437 (CP437).

CP437 was based on American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), which defines the first 127 characters. This was a big change for IBM who had previously used the fundamentally different EBCDIC standard. But as ASCII covers only 96 printable characters of the total 256 available in 8-bit code, IBM had to figure out what to do with the rest of them.

The article goes into the history of how the CP437 characters were chosen, the control character choices, and how “the small house” might be a house, a Greek Delta, or other.

See the whole article here. Found via Waxy on BlueSky.