[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)
Random832
random832 at fastmail.com
Sat Jul 9 04:23:11 AEST 2016
On Fri, Jul 8, 2016, at 10:52, Clem Cole wrote:
> I can not speak for anyone else. But at the time when I was a part
> of the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs I personally do not believe I
> had ever heard of the term "solidus." Such a term maybe had been used
> in my first form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s I had
> long ago forgotten any/all of my Latin. I certainly did not try to
> remember it as a computer professional.
>
> In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to
> the asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang" from the
> sound made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from
> the console TTY. But slash was what we called the character that is
> now next to the shift key on modern keyboards. I do not remember
> ever using, much less needed to refer to, the character "back slash"
> until the unfortunate crap that the folks in Redmond forced on the
> industry.
You never had to use it for escaping in C/Regex/Troff/etc?
> Although interestingly enough, the vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol
> was used and discussed freely in those days. I find it interesting
> that Redmond-ism became the unshifted character, not the vertical bar
> by the shear force of economics of the PC.
ASCII keyboards had \ unshifted long before the PC. The ASR-33 didn't
have it (it didn't have pipe at all - backslash was on shift-L), but
every DEC keyboard I can find did, as did the ADM-3a, and incidentally
the Symbolics Lisp Machine's keyboard.
I had suspected the reason that [\] ended up as the unshifted characters
is because {|} were not available on uppercase-only keyboards, but I
can't find any uppercase terminals that had separate keys for them (the
ASR-33 had them on shift- KLM). I expect that's also why ^, on shift-N,
was used for pipes rather than the vertical bar in the earliest versions
of Unix that had them.
What terminals did you use, back in those days?
(Incidentally, I can find *literally no* pictures of a Teletype 37,
and no sufficiently high-quality closeups of a 38 to determine its
keyboard layout)
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