From: m35products (m35prod@optonline.net)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 21:17:48 PDT
Thank you, Wayne. That was a very interesting report.
I would like to point out that I never use the < or > or ~ or { or }[ or ]
or \ or | symbols. I cannot speak for other 56-year old white bald
semi-computer-literate guys. I just know that occasionally I need the 1/4
1/3 1/2 /1/5 etc etc etc symbols, and I don't have them available. I also am
offended by the fact that I must release the shift key to be able to type a
period or comma. On typewriters, the period and comma were available in
either upper or lower case situations.
iN ADDITTION, i WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT (oops, there it goes again)
sometimes I accidentally push the Caps Lock key. Since it must use one of
those 7-bit codes, and I don't need it, why not get rid of it? We all got
along without it BC (before computers).
End of rant. A P Bloom
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wayne Harris" <papercu@hotmail.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 11:11 PM
Subject: [MV] No MV Content but all you need to know about the ¢ key
> 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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