I played around with the alternative layouts, but they weren’t that interesting, except for the French-Canadian keyboard layout, which also changed the cursor prompt from “]” to “¿” no other keyboard layout did anything similar. One of the settings that could be changed this way was the keyboard layout. This could be used to throttle down the speed for older games, or change settings that would, on older machines, have been set via hardware jumpers. In order to ensure this compatibility, there was a “control panel,” accessible at any time via a keystroke combination*, that let the user change the machine’s settings.
#SEMICOLON VS GREEK QUESTION MARK SOFTWARE#
However, unlike the Mac, it was backwardly compatible with all the software and peripherals designed for earlier Apple II generations. It had an OS with a graphical desktop interface like a Macintosh. I encountered an unexpected appearance of the “¿” character on my old Apple IIGS computer. There are images, including a side-by-side comparison of the various early varieties, and a discussion of “hand-wringing sages forecast a literary apocalypse precipitated by too-casual attitudes about punctuation” Watson warns against mistaking the – que abbreviation for a semicolon, something that is rarely a problem in these days of fallen Latinity. (For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”) Gill Sans MT’s semicolon has perfect posture, while Didot’s puffs its chest out pridefully. We moderns have accumulated a host of characterful semicolons to choose from: Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat slouched against the wall at a party. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course.
On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by the Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers.
De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. Cecelia Watson, a historian and philosopher of science who teaches at Bard College, writes for the Paris Review about one of the many lasting products of the Renaissance:
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