Ever wondered where those two little symbols we see everyday, the command key and the spinning beach ball of death (aka SBBOD, or Rainbow Ball), come from? We're sure you're wondering now, so why don't we fill you in, courtesy of those zany folks at Gizmodo and a little Wiki knowledge.

Command

Oh that cantankerous Steve Jobs, always complaining about something or the other. It's how everything at Apple gets to be the way it is, and the Apple key is no different. Jobs was not fond of the symbol used to represent the Apple key. His reaction to Andy Hertzfeld, who was part of the original Mac development team and helped develop menu commands, was: "There are too many Apples on the screen! It's ridiculous! We're taking the Apple logo in vain!" So of course, things were changed, and that little loop-de-loop we know and love replaced (or stood next to) the original apple on the Apple key.

Where does the loop come from? Bitmap artist Susan Kore found it in an international symbol directory. It's used in Scandinavia to mark places of interest and cultural locations, and is the official road sign for tourist attractions in Sweden (as a result, those Swedish Mac users call the key Fornminne--ancient monument). It's also known as the Gorgon Loop or Saint John's Arm's, dating back to pre-Christian times. But, in Unicode Standard, it's simply the "place of interest" sign.

SBBOD

Officially the "spinning wait cursor" the spinning beach ball of death spells trouble to most Mac users, so we usually just curse at it. Making its first appearance in OS X, it tells us an application is not responding, so we either have to force quit it, or wait.

The ball, as many of us know, was originally a wrist watch in Mac OS 9. The rainbow ball is a natural extension, but where did it come from? It was, in the shape of an optical disk, used in NeXTstep, a precursor to OS X. The ball was supposed to represent the removable and rewritable magneto-optical disks NEXT computers ran from. But, regardless of where it came from, we still groan when we see it.

Feeling a little enlightened? We thought so. Just don't use this bit of geekery when you're out at the bar; it might not work out so well for you!

Follow this article's author, Ambika Subramony, on Twitter.