Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font

Summary

Rome wasn't built in a day, and the same is true of desktop operating systems. The modern versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux we know and (sometimes) love today represent decades of iteration and overhauls, but much of that legacy is invisible. New design languages and interfaces show up every few years, and in the process, old applications and designs are covered up or replaced.It doesn't take long to find legacy holdovers in today's Windows 11—for example, that Windows 3.1-era file picker is still hanging around. The macOS platform is a much different story, as Apple frequently rips out or redesigns core system components. You can't even (natively) run games or applications more than a few years old on a modern Mac, so finding components undisturbed for decades is a rarity. Even the built-in Chess game got an update recently.However, there is one place where PowerPC processors, Apple's Newton PDAs, and other relics of Apple's past are still present in modern Mac computers: the Apple Symbols font.Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003, and one of its many improvements was a new system font called Apple Symbols. It included many common Mac and Apple symbols in a standard TrueType font with Unicode characters, so they could be easily used across Mac applications and documentation. Apple now provides the SF Symbols library as the main way for Mac applications to use common system icons and animations, but the original font is still there.The current version in macOS Sequoia 15.1 includes 4400 glyphs, with the copyright information listed as "© Copyright 2003-2006 by Apple Computer, Inc." I have Mac OS X Panther on a partition on my PowerMac G3, and I pulled that font version for comparison—it has 1224 glyphs.Many of the glyphs in the Apple Symbols font are general purpose icons, corresponding to standard Unicode characters, but there are some Mac-specific images. The font has several variations of the Apple logo, as well as icons for a generic floppy disk, Son...