From: Wayne Harris (papercu@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 20:11:15 PDT
>From www.charlieanderson.com/centsi
When I was a boy, not so long ago, there was a thing called the cent sign.
It looked like this: ¢
It was the dollar sign's little brother, and lived on comic books covers and
in newspaper advertisements and on pay phones and wherever anything was
being sold for less than a buck. It was a popular punctuation symbol—no
question mark, or dollar sign, certainly, but just behind the * in
popularity, and I daresay well ahead of #, &, and the now Internet-hot @.
It owned an unshifted spot on the typewriter keyboard, just to the right of
the semicolon, and was part of every third grader's working knowledge.
In the late 1990s, you don't see many cent signs. Why? Because hardly
anything costs less than a dollar anymore? Actually, the demise of the cent
sign has little to do with inflation, and everything to do with computers.
And therein lies a tale.
In the 1960s a disparate group of American computer manufacturers
(basically, everyone but IBM) got together and agreed on an encoding
standard that became known as ASCII ("ass-key"—The American Standard Code
for Information Interchange). This standard simply assigned a number to
each of the various symbols used in written communication (e.g., A-Z, a-z,
0-9, period, comma). A standard made it possible for a Fortran program
written for a Univac machine to make sense to a programmer (and a Fortran
compiler) on a Control Data computer. And for a Teletype terminal to work
with a Digital computer, and so on.
So-called text files, still in widespread use today, consist of sequences of
these numbers (or codes) to represent letters, spaces, and end-of-lines.
Text editors, for example, the Windows Notepad application, display ASCII
codes as lines of text on your screen so that you can read and edit them.
Similarly, an ASCII keyboard spits out the value 65 when you type a capital
'A,' 65 being the ASCII code for 'A.'
The committee decided on a seven bit code; this allowed for twice as many
characters as existing six bit standards, and permitted a parity bit on
eight bit tape. So there were 128 slots to dole out, and given the various
non-typographic computing agendas to attend to, it was inevitable that some
common symbols, including several that had always been on typewriter
keyboards, wouldn't make the cut. (The typewriter layout had certain
obvious failings in computer applications, for example: overloading the
digit 1 and lower case L, so it couldn't be blindly adopted.)
Three handy fractions were cut: ¼ ½ ¾. This makes sense, especially when
you consider that the ASCII committee was composed of engineers. I'm sure
they thought, in their engineer's way, "Why have ¼ but not 1/3? And if we
have 1/3, then why not 1/5? Or 3/32?" Similarly, the committee apparently
found $0.19 an acceptable, if somewhat obtuse, way of expressing the price
of a Bic pen. At any rate, the popular and useful cent sign didn't make it.
And so the cent sign was off keyboards, terminals, and printers. Not that
many people noticed right away. The companies behind ASCII sold big,
expensive computers that were used to run businesses, and few cared that
there wasn't a cent sign character on one's new line printer. Heck, if your
printer could handle lower-case letters, you were state of the art.
But when personal computers began to appear in the late 1970s, the primary
application driving their adoption was word processing. These new small
computers used the ASCII standard—after all, that's what standards are for.
By the millions, typewriter keyboards (with ¢) were traded in for Apple IIs
and IBM PCs (without ¢). While it's true that the cent sign was ultimately
made part of other larger encoding standards, and is possible to create at
modern PCs with a little effort—the damage had been done. Without a cent
key in front of them, writers of books, newspapers, magazines, and
advertisements made do without. And over time, $0.19 began to look like the
right way to say 19¢. In another few years the cent sign will look as alien
as those strange S's our forefathers were using when they wrote the
constitution.
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