Hmm, at this point I think I might be imagining it ... I'll let you know if I can find it ...

Some older Apple keyboards had their backspace button labelled “delete” which to me made it sound like that was the “del” button and not the backspace button.

That was the convention on many older computing platforms.

A "Backspace" key on a typewriter did not actually delete: It merely moved the typing position back one space.