In 1993 Prince mailed 3.5-inch floppy disks to newsrooms because his new name was a symbol no keyboard on Earth could type.

When Prince renamed himself with a symbol no typewriter or keyboard could produce, his team solved the problem by mailing newsrooms a floppy disk holding a font with exactly one character.

On June 7, 1993 — his 35th birthday — Prince announced he was retiring his name in favor of an unpronounceable glyph, the "Love Symbol," a fusion of the signs for male and female. It was a grand gesture, and it created an immediate, mundane crisis: no editor at any newspaper or magazine on Earth could type the thing. So Prince's people did something startlingly practical. They mailed 3.5-inch floppy disks to media outlets, each containing a custom font that let a newsroom reproduce the symbol in print.

The disks were the workaround for a problem that was, at bottom, technical. A symbol that exists only as a drawing can't travel through the era's word processors and typesetting systems. Type it, and you get nothing. The fix was to make it a font.

How the floppy-disk font actually worked

As Fast Company laid out in its 2016 account, the disk held a small, Mac- and PC-compatible font in which the symbol was mapped to a single keystroke — it replaced the capital letter "P." An editor could install the font, hit that key, and the glyph appeared, sized to match the surrounding text. For anyone who couldn't wait for the mail, the same font was made available to download on CompuServe, the online service of the day.

The design work came out of Prince's own Paisley Park operation. In an interview New York magazine conducted with Paisley Park designer Chuck Hermes — quoted in that Fast Company piece — Hermes described the team building the digital rendition so the symbol could exist as reproducible type rather than a one-off logo. Variety's 2023 retrospective, marking 30 years since the change, put the same fact plainly: the symbol didn't exist on a keyboard, so floppy discs with a digital version were sent to media outlets, a mailing Variety attributed to Warner Bros. NPR, writing in 2017, summarized it in a sentence: Prince sent around floppy disks containing a font with just one character.

The concrete detail worth holding onto is that economy. Not a typeface. Not a family of letters. One glyph, one key, one keystroke — a font engineered to do exactly one job and nothing else.

Why he did it, and what stayed unsettled

The reason behind the whole affair was a contract fight. Prince was locked in a dispute with Warner Bros. over the ownership and pace of his output, and abandoning the name "Prince" — which the label controlled as a brand — was a way of asserting that the artist and the trademark were not the same thing. Reporters, unable to say or spell the glyph, defaulted to calling him "the Artist Formerly Known as Prince," a phrase that became its own kind of monument to the stunt.

There's a lingering question about how far the change ever really went. Mental Floss, in its 2023 write-up, confirms the June 7, 1993 birthday announcement and the accompanying press release, but notes that even Prince's own camp was uncertain about the legal footing. His lawyer, Londell McMillan, doubted whether renaming yourself as a symbol was a valid legal maneuver at all. The record supports calling it his stage name; it does not cleanly support the claim that a court ever recognized an unpronounceable mark as a legal name.

So the floppy disks sit at an odd intersection — a genuine feat of small-bore invention deployed in service of a gesture whose legal reality remains murky. What isn't in doubt is the object itself: a piece of plastic that shipped to newsrooms carrying a single character, because a musician had decided to name himself something the machinery of print could not otherwise render. The disks worked. Whether the name they carried was ever more than a magnificent bluff is the part still open to argue.