The "cent key"

[Jerry Feldman]

On Sun, 08 Jul 2007 11:36:02 -0400
Jason Stephenson <jason at sigio.com> wrote:

> VirginSnow at vfemail.net wrote:
> 
> > Now you have my $.02.  (Why isn't there a cent key on the IMB keyboard??)
> 
> The spot where most typewriters (even those from IBM) have the cent key 
> is taken up by ^ on most computer keyboards. Interestingly, the cent 
> character is not a part of the basic ASCII character set. A bit 
> surprising, really, when you consider that until email came along the @ 
> was relegated to mostly archaic uses as a short hand for "each."

The ASCII character set was originally a 7 bit character set defined in
the late 1950s when the input device was an ASR 33 teletype. ASCII
started to replace the old baudot code which was (if I remember a 4 bit
code). Note that IBM mainframes used BCDIC (then EBCDIC). Some teletype
machines could be set to use the 8th bit as a parity bit for punched
paper tape. Most major computer manufacturers (other than IBM such as
Digital, GE) used ASCII and even IBM used ASCII in their printers. I had
to patch the translate tables in a 370 so the system would print things
like { for C programming,. The IBM keyboards lacked a couple of
characters, such as the curly brace. 



-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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