Computer Symbols

 

Shut down :
World war II engineers used binary system 1("on") and off ("0") to label their power button. 

  In 1973, the International Electrotechnical Commission codified a broken circle with a line inside it as "standby power state," and sticks to that story even now. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too vague, and altered the definition to simply mean power.
Ethernet  :

 
 The Ethernet symbol was designed by IBM's David Hill. According to Hill, the symbol was part of a set of symbols that were all meant to depict the various local area network connections available at the time. The array of blocks, which are purposefully non-hierarchical, each represent computers/terminals. While Hill makes no specific mention of Bob Metcalfe's earliest Ethernet sketches, it's easy to see how the modern symbol uses them for inspiration.

Linux : The Tux

The official Mascot of Linux ,the penguin popularly known as TUX ,was created as an entry to a Linux logo competition. The concept of using Penguin was the idea of The Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Linus Torvalds is firstly inspired by a photograph of an FTP websites ,showing a Penguin Figurine looking strangely.

It is however designed by Larry Ewing and then modified by Torvalds.
The name Tux was given by James Hughes, who said that it stood for "(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)".

Google Products

Picasa 

The Picasa logo, a logo for a Google software package with which you can manage and edit your personal pictures, is a stylized representation of an old fashioned shutter mechanism. The opened shutter shows the whitespace of a house, referring to  Casa and to the fact it's for home and/or personal use. The 'Pi' part in the wordmark most likely stands for pixel.

Pi + casa  = Pi stands for pixels and casa is an italian word meaning house.

GMAIL :

 The GMAIL logo was designed just one night before the launch of product. Initially designed in the Catull font or so called Google font the G MAIL logo finally changed and then only the letter 'G' was kept in Catull font.
The "m," of course, appears as a small envelope, the ubiquitous Gmail symbol we have come to know well.

Google Logo

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol", which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original paper on PageRank:"We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10^100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines."
Google has had many logos since its renaming from BackRub. The current official Google logo was designed by Ruth Kedar, and is a wordmark based on the Catull typeface.

In 1998, Sergey Brin created a computerized version of the Google letters using the free graphics program GIMP. The typeface was changed and an exclamation mark was added, mimicking the Yahoo! logo.




"There were a lot of different color iterations", says Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules."

In 2010, the Google logo received its first major and permanent overhaul since 1999. The new logo was first tested in November 2009, and was officially launched on May 6, 2010.It utilises an identical typeface to the previous logo, but the "o" is distinctly more orange-colored in place of the previously more yellowish "o", as well as a much more subtle shadow rendered in a different shading style.