ear-fung.us I’m a programmer. I’m also pro-grammar.

Symbols.com – Symbol 25:18

Symbols.com has an interesting look at the "Apple Symbol" as it is known in the computer world:

In Germanic countries this structure is called St. Hans' cross or the cross of St John. In Scandinavia it is a magic ideogram from the Viking era, or even older. It seems also to have been used in Cabbalistic mysticism. Today, it is used as a cartographic and traffic sign to denote ancient remains or an ancient monument.

Here's a source from the horse's mouth:

It's difficult to come up with a small icon that means "command", and we didn't think of anything right away. Our bitmap artist Susan Kare had a comprehensive international symbol dictionary and she leafed through it, looking for an appropriate symbol that was distinctive, attractive and had at least something to do with the concept of a menu command.

Finally she came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground. She rendered a 16 x 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team, and everybody liked it. Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.