Thursday, March 18, 2010

On/Of switch symbol confusion

on/off switch symbolThe commonly used power on/off symbol used on computers is officially the IEC 5009 standby symbol. There is a high quality open access version of the symbol in the Wikicommons. This symbol is often confused with on/off.

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1 Comments:

OpenID cjohnson2 said...

the use of the 'power' symbol (the broken circle with a line) is probably justified. According to IEEE 1621 this symbol indicates soft off rather than hard power off (a line inside the circle). Many (most?) computer "power" switches are in fact not hard ON/OFF - they are soft, and when "off" the computer has residual operations going on (the clock if nothing else, a network card etc etc) that are not controlled by this switch.

March 24, 2010 5:32 PM  

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