As an Atari ST user from 1985 to roughly 1993, I wasn't expecting the author would actually mention GEM/TOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I scrolled down and, lo, there it is.<p>That said, since the "X" in this case is white on a black background, I always interpreted the icon as four arrows pointing inward to indicate a shrinking/disappearing motion. In fact, when you closed a window, GEM would play an (inelegant) animation akin to the Macintosh of the time, composed of a sequence of boxes first shrinking from the size of the window to a small box and then shuffling that off to the top left of the screen.<p>As bemmu points out, the maximize button (at the top right in a GEM/TOS window) is four arrows pointing outward. Incidentally, GEM did not have a notion of "minimize."<p>Put another way, although I find the Japanese inspiration argument interesting, I don't think there's a whole lot to it. I think it's a fun coincidence.<p>In any event, thank you for the trip down memory lane and for the fun screen grabs!
Another old example.<p>WordStar: Used "X" to Exit to system in its main menu (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markgregory/6946218793/?rb=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/markgregory/6946218793/?rb=1</a>) - I do not know the revision shown in the screen shot.<p>According to Wikipedia (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar</a>) WordStar was released in 1978. Which moves the date back to at least 1978 to use X for exit.<p>However, there is possibly a very simple explanation that the blog posting overlooked. In text menu's, such as WordStar's, which were quite common for a lot of software from that era, using the word "Exit" to mean "leave this program/application" was also common. When one goes looking for a single character memonic for "Exit" to build in as a keystroke to activate the "Exit" command from the menu, one has four choices: [e] [x] [i] [t]<p>Since [x] is an uncommon letter, while e, i, t, are more common, and therefore more likely to be used for triggering other commands in the menu(s), choosing [x] to mean exit meant that the same character could likely be used as a universal "leave this menu" command key across all the menus.<p>Which would then lead to the common _F_ile->E_x_it command accelerators in drop down style menus (whether in a GUI or in a text menuing system). [x] was unlikely to have been used for the keyboard accelerator for other entries in the "file" menu, so picking e[x]it was a safe choice.<p>It is not a far reach from _F_ile->E_x_it using [x] as its accelerator key to labeling the title bar button that performs the same function with an X as well, to take advantage of whatever familiarity users might have with the drop down menu accelerators
Interesting, but the connection to symbols from Japan seems a bit dubious (or at least not very recent). The term "cross out", and hence the use of an "x" to indicate negating something, seems to have been in common use in English since at least the 1920s:
<a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cross+out" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cross+out</a>
Wow, I had always thought the "X" was like an elevator close button. Sort of like a greater-than sign and a less-than sign put together: ><.
The Acorn Arthur operating system, a precursor to Risc OS used a sort of fat X icon to close windows in 1987<p><a href="http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/arthur2.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/arthur2.gif</a>
RiscOS had the x as well in the late 1980s<p>edit - Here's Arthur, the precursor to RiscOS in ~ 1986 - <a href="http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/1024/IMG_8131.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/10...</a> - It has nice x icons.
<i>In this early demo (Codename: Chicago), the minimize and maximize buttons have been redesigned, but the close button remains the same, and to the left as before.</i><p>I wonder where the author got the idea that the [-] button at the top-left was a close icon. It was the "Control Box", a menu icon. AFAIK it's still there, just invisible -- hit alt+space to open it.<p>Disclaimer: I'm currently unable to test that.
I worked at Atari, on the Atari ST (writing a bunch of systems-level code). My cow-orkers were working closely with DRI to port GEM to the ST hardware. GEM wasn't done yet, and much of the engineering effort there was helping DRI finish it up. A lot of stuff was done on the Atari side of the fence that never made it back to the DRI sources.<p>I can categorically state that there wasn't any Japanese influence on that "X".<p>If anything, it was programmer art. We Atari folks were mostly video-game programmers, with <i>some</i> sense of design, and a lot of the stuff that was coming out of DRI was pretty ugly. So it probably got tweaked late a night until it "looked pretty" and wasn't revisited (the ST was started and shipped in about 10 months, so we were in kind of a hurry).
As the article shows, the close button on MacOS classic was basically an empty box, but on mousing down on that box, it transformed into something that looks a bit like an x. I'm basing this on what I can see from using [1], but from my possibly inaccurate recollection of using the real thing in the 80s and 90s, some versions of MacOS had an even more "x like" mouse down image on the close button.<p>[1] <a href="http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/" rel="nofollow">http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/</a>
The delete/rubout key on many old terminals had an X on it. Like this: <a href="http://www.cosam.org/images/vt220/keyboard.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.cosam.org/images/vt220/keyboard.jpg</a>
I always found it interesting that Sony swapped the X and O buttons for the western Playstation market. In Japan X (batsu) does mean "back" or "no", whereas elsewhere it is reversed.
They mention X and O on the PS controller but usually in games O is for no and X is for yes. Completely opposite of the batsu/maru, incorrent/correct they were discussing.
No 'x' to close vi? Was that not always there? I've certainly been using it as long as I can remember; that's not to say it's always been there though - does anyone know when it was first available?<p>Edit: seems Wordstar used X too, probably starting in 1978.
Too bad, that popular Windows applications like Skype and Spotify have gone against this and made "X to minimize". And their making of Alt+F4 also to minimize drives me nuts.
What about crossing out dates or tasks?<p><a href="http://cache1.asset-cache.net/gc/88203236-calendar-with-dates-crossed-out-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=35VXefqbfky52bmcKHRgj0npKe9jkjCibt1WYq781dM%3D" rel="nofollow">http://cache1.asset-cache.net/gc/88203236-calendar-with-date...</a><p>Or crossing-out an item to "delete" it on the page?
NeXT had X buttons to close windows before windows 95, with a very similar look to to win 95 window button styles too. I think NeXTStep 1.0 was in 1989 or thereabouts.
I recall being mildly shocked when Windows 95 came out with the the [x] button. I don't know why, but I thought that it was somewhat dangerous to allow users to quickly exit an application like this.<p>Maybe it's because I was used to Windows 3.11, where you had to actually double-click the [-] button to exit an application.
In the Atari TOS screenshots, other icons such as arrows are black on white background.<p>If the icons in upper left and right are also like that, then the upper left icon is actually four little triangles pointing inwards and not an X. The one on the right is four little triangles pointing outwards.<p>(Or it could be an X)
UPDATED:<p>So this little article has travelled pretty far! There were a lot of good tips, comments and insights into the origin of [x] but none as good as this email that I received from Windows 95 team member Daniel Oran.<p>“Hi Lauren,<p>A friend forwarded me your Medium piece, “X to Close.” He remembered that I had worked on Windows 95 at Microsoft — I created the Start Button and Taskbar — and thought I’d be amused. I was! :-)<p>It’s fun to see how history gets written when you actually lived those long-ago events. I joined Microsoft in 1992 as a program manager for the user interface of “Chicago,” which was the code name for what eventually became Windows 95. <p>So, who was responsible for this last minute change? As far as I can tell, this person is responsible for the proliferation and widespread use of [x] in UI design today.<p>It wasn’t a last-minute change. During 1993, we considered many variations of the close-button design. And the source wasn’t Atari. It was NeXT, which had an X close button in the upper right, along with the grayscale faux-3D look that we borrowed for Windows 95.<p>I wanted to put the Windows X close button in the upper left, but that conflicted with the existing Windows Alt-spacebar menu and also a new program icon, which we borrowed fromOS/2, on which Microsoft had originally partnered with IBM.<p>Attached is the earliest Chicago bitmap I could find that includes an X close button. It’s dated 9/22/1993. (In attaching the file to this email, I just realized that it’s so old that it has only an eight-character name. Before Windows 95, that was the limit.)<p>Thanks for your very entertaining essay!<p>Best,<p>Danny”<p>I guess you could say case [x]ed.<p>Thanks again to everyone who helped track down earlier examples of GUIs and early text editors that used [x] to close as well. Fascinating!
Windows 95 was the first time I remember using it, and I have been using PC's since TRS model 80. It makes sense, X means "stop" in most cases and stop essentially means close or terminate a process / app.
Windows versions prior to Windows 95 lacked an "X" button, but double clicking on the left menu icon would close the window.<p>A behavior still present in modern versions.
The use of the X symbol to mean "cancel, close" isn't nearly so mysterious as the author claims. "Cross off" and "cross out" are common phrases in English, and traditionally denoted by an X symbol (the "cross").<p>There is no reason to suppose that the GUI usage was inspired in any way by exotic Japan. The X as "cancel symbol" has been quite common in the west and indeed worldwide for millenia.
"Vi, vim, emacs or edlin?<p>No [x] to close these 1980's text editors either. X was commonly used to delete characters in-line, but not to close the program."<p>Hmm... I've used :x to write+quit in Vim for years. And, :X is to encrypt+quit. Don't have a year when that was added though. Could be fun to try and dig that up.
Wow great article. I don't agree with his conclusion that it came from Japan. But it's as good a reason as any I suppose.<p>One quick thing, IIR Windows 2.0 and 3.0, the '-' button in the upper left wasn't "close". It was a small menu that happened to have close as an option.
If you want to see the UI of GEM for yourself, here's an in browser emulator of an Atari ST with GEM:<p><a href="http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/atari-st/" rel="nofollow">http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/atari-st/</a>
OS/2 gets pretty close with a [ / ]<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#mediaviewer/File:Os2W4.png" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#mediaviewer/File:Os2W4.png</a>
IIRC on windows 3.1 keyboard navigation X was always the key for exiting, as E was already used for other things.<p>I clearly remember that for closing windows one could do alt+f4 (which was itself a shortcut to Close) or open the file menu (Alt+F) and select eXit.<p>I can't check but I believe it was the same for Write and notepad as well and any other programs that had the Exit option.<p>So maybe that's where the windows 95 developer took inspiration for the X icon
When we have completed a todo task we "cross it" to mark it done. i would say the x to close is intended to represent a "crossing out" not the letter x. It is pressed to signify a task has been completed.
Lots of banner ads make the close symbol e.g. the second from right (swap maximize and close) or swap the functions... thus exploiting muscle memory of people to open the ad :/
I think I remember that hitting the "close" button on early, black-and-white macs would make a star appear in the square, signifying the press. Almost like the X...
Perhaps it's not an icon, and was meant to indicate eXit. I know must use 'q' for quit, but I've seen a few programs that use 'x'
I'm not icon designer, but I just finished the hackdesign.org course (I recommend it) and now I understand a little bit of it and now I always try to think as one.<p>The [X] icon in graphic windows software (not in WordStar, Vim, etc), and not thinking as a letter of the alphabet (remember that maximize and minimize don't are also) but just as picture, it remembers me something collapsing. Like something bigger in a normal state with the borders collapsing to a center till disappear. As when you turn off and old CRT television (or an Android powered cell phone).
'X' always seemed fitting for another, more poetic, reason: The kiss of death (X also represents a kiss). I wonder if it was in the designers mind.