These Keys Shouldn't Exist | Nostalgia Nerd

Couple of corrections; I should say 58 and 64 characters at 2:40, not 54 and 60. My bad. Also, the main reason that Americans refer to the # symbol as pound is due to weight, not the currency..... It was an off the cuff comment, lacking context, BUT... one pound sterling is actually derived from one pound (weight) of silver. The currency symbol £ is a stylised L, the initial letter of the Latin word libra from which comes lb as an abbreviation for pound weight, in the same way as # is.... So, it actually makes entire sense to occupy the same key. It's a roundabout way, but we get there! You can read more about it at www.quora.com/Why-did-the-British-use-pound-as-the… - Thanks to Johnm2012 & everyone else for the comments! Stay safe.

Two character sets walk into a bar. "Whoa there, break it up!" yells the bartender.

Someone once said to me "standards are great, there are so many that everybody can have one of their own".

Wait, so if the "| ¬" were substituted with "! ^" because of the glyphs similarity, why was "!" used as the not symbol and "^" for the exclusive or ?

On danish keyboard there are 3 vertical bar symbols: - one above Tab - one next to left Shift - one next to Backspace

The pipe is literally used in the title of this video

Fast forward a few decades and now the exclamation mark is also used for "logical NOT"

The ! being used as the logical or hurts my modern programmer brain.

I'd love to see the continuity between all of this and the whole Unicode thing (which is still evolving and features the bottomless pit of emojis)

I'm a retired American programmer with a specialty in communication protocols and printer drivers. I struggled with this and more a long time ago. My introduction (really a trial-by-fire) was way back in 1981 when writing a 68000 program that needed to communicate and translate between multiple mainframe ebcdic code pages (US/UK/DE) and ascii (multiple code pages and special printer character sets). It got worse when I switched to the IBM AT in 1985. I thought I was the only one interested in this topic. Thanks for the nostalgia trip and reminding me of details I've long forgotten. (BTW - I didn't start calling # a 'hash' until I was "corrected" by the UK and German branch offices. Always 'number' or 'pound' depending on context.)

Linux still uses the pipe.

This is probably my favorite video I've seen you do yet. I work in the ASCii character set everyday for my job (HL7 database integrations) and I never quite knew this whole history. Really well researched. I've read several of the IBM history books to understand the punchcard era, and their perspective has largely been "We're IBM and we'll do it our own way, thank you! " and then they accidently created a standard with the PC. Awesome to see this entire other story I never knew existed.

I was familiar with using pipe due to being a Linux user, but I had no idea about its history.

"If you've ever used MS DOS" shows a pipe and the `more` command, both originating from Unix

Fascinating, I always like weirdish documentaries explaining things I wouldn't be bothered to google about. T'was interesting my good man.

17:55 "So as a recap..." Clever man.

Me, presented with a foreign keyboard "Now where could my pipe be?"

To pipe, or to partial pipe? That is the question we ASCII. Sorry, I really couldn't help myself. Neat video!

Im glad I watched this, well done weird little bit of history. Sadly , Now YT will bombard me with 36 videos a day about fonts and keyboards

Fun fact: people call the hash symbol (octothorpe, #) a pound symbol because it originated as a corruption of the abbreviation lb. for weight. In olden days, they used to denote abbreviations with a bar across the top of the symbol, so lb-bar slowly became a hash when people began to write it more quickly and sloppily!