The Glyph Drawing Club blog has a fantastic post about the "small house" to be found in IBM code page 437. Unicode has inherited it (hopefully it'll show up quoted below in whatever form your system offers) but why was it there?
There's a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. "Small house"—that's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for "Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things? … Why did IBM decide to include a symbol representing a house in their character set? It's a strange glyph; adding a smiley is readily arguable, and playing card suits have existed in prior character sets, but a house—as far as I can tell—it didn't exist as a glyph anywhere before IBM's Code Page 437. It seems to come out of thin air. To my knowledge, there are no (surviving) documents on the design process of the character set. The little bit we know comes from a few interviews, like the one with David J. Bradley, and from meticulous research done by people like VileR. So, the only thing I can do is speculate
The hypotheses: a symbol representing home computers; an idea for an "upward" delete; or borrowed from another system for some lost or misunderstood reason—System/23, Wang word processors and Blissymbolics have similar symbols. The plainest and most convincing is that it was a delta (Δ) character that was drawn like a little house (per Wang) and subsequently got confusing.
(it doesn't have the little red door in the original character sets, obviously!)
·∙•↔*⌂S§¼╣$♫b%⌂≈←·
Why is there a "small house" in IBM's Code page 437? [glyphdrawing.club]
