These Keys Shouldn't Exist | Nostalgia Nerd
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- čas přidán 30. 05. 2020
- [Head to www.squarespace.com/nostalgia... to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code NOSTALGIANERD] Welcome to the world of PIPE symbols, vertical lines and bars. Why are there two pipe symbols on a computer keyboard? Why are there two vertical lines on keyboards? Why does a solid line produce a broken line? ASCII? What does Ascii and character sets have to do with this? Why is the bar broken? Why is it no longer broken? What does ANY of this mean. Find out within (disclaimer: this video might actually confuse you more than you are right now).
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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-unit-of-both-currency-and-weight - Thanks to Johnm2012 & everyone else for the comments! Stay safe.
On Scandinavian keyboards our key left of the 1 key is used for | or §, while the key at the lower left is used for < and >, which I use a lot being a website programmer.
Erm, not quite - nice try though! The # is a ligature of lb, used to measure the weight of something, whereas £ is specifically used to denote the weight of silver, itself a ligature of the Latin L...
I finally realized what this | symbol means:
_A pipe dream._
I shall take my leave now.
Incredibly minor point, but ISO is not a true acronym - that body is called the International Organization for Standardization, not the International Standards Organization. From their website, ISO is derived from the Greek 'isos', meaning equal, because they didn't want to have a short name that was different in each language. Also ISO (and standards) are always read "iso", not "I S O".
7:52 I think you swapped the "or" and "not": ! is used for "not" and ^ is used for "or" (usually "xor") in most programming languages.
Two character sets walk into a bar. "Whoa there, break it up!" yells the bartender.
Underrated
Incomprehensible.
Understandable, have a nice day
i'm dummy someone explain the joke ;w;
¦\
The pipe is literally used in the title of this video
The full one? Was surprised why the broken pipe is on the thumbnail but the full one in the title.
HappyBeezerStudios - by Lord_Mogul On modern computers both the broken pipe and regular pipe are displayed the same. Some keyboards may show the pipe symbol as broken, but when entering it, it will not be broken.
The Em-dash is far more useful.
the title takes the idea of "These Keys Shouldn't Exist" and sends it through to the "Nostalgia Nerd" program, the output is this video
@@gavintantleff I'll copy my earlier comment: The one near Z: | and the one near 1: ¦ - the latter being broken here as I type. However, in Windows Notepad, it's the former one that's broken, not the latter one. In DOS, both are broken but I don't know if both 'work' as 'pipe'.
To me, pipe is a broken line whereas a vertical line is not.
Wait, so if the "| ¬" were substituted with "! ^" because of the glyphs similarity, why was "!" used as the not symbol and "^" for the exclusive or ?
You'll be amused that they actually are used somewhat like that. In python the logical comparisons use != to test if two objects are the same.
For example
The expression 4 != 4 will return False.
The expression 'a' != 'barbara' will return True because the strings are not the same.
4 == 4 will return True etc.
It is not the only language I've used that follows this notation.
@@Michallote I think they mean why they were switched around. Because | means "OR" and was substituted with !, but ! is often used as "NOT" in various languages.
I have no idea, but it seems to have originated in B before moving on to its use in C and elsewhere.
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
Because CZcams, operating on over two decades of development of the most advanced software for extrapolating what humans are looking for, still doesn't understand the simple concept of multiple fields of interest, and will instead replace all of your perfectly satisfactory video suggestions with ONE topic that you happened to have watched three videos on, instantly dumping the overwhelming data from years of consistent viewing habits regarding a fixed pool of interests in favour of one topic that peeked your interest for 30 minutes. The most embarrassing billion-dollar effort ever. Probably it just plays dumb.
lmao for me the recommendation actually worked since I’m interested in that kind of stuff
Just accept it; this is your life now. You love fonts and keyboards.
@@dinoschachten just hit the three dots on a recommended video and click not interested. It should fix the algorithm. Or you can always remove certain videos from your watch history to fix it as well.
"Sadly"? Fuckin' bring on the fonts and keyboards, I say. lol
Someone once said to me "standards are great, there are so many that everybody can have one of their own".
Unicode has been the great unifier, though.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I agree! there has only been 25 versions of it! :-/
All backward-compatible. If you ignore the Korean move and the whole unfortunate UCS-2 era ...
I know that one as "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Well it might be one day when software catches up. But by that time it will likely have been replaced by a new standard.
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.)
On danish keyboard there are 3 vertical bar symbols:
- one above Tab
- one next to left Shift
- one next to Backspace
That's a lot of bars in a pretty small country. :D
so you can pipe the pipe to a pipe |||
"If you've ever used MS DOS"
*shows a pipe and the `more` command, both originating from Unix*
11:13
Or just be a Linux user, or any Unix, we use pipe constantly.
I thought that "|" & "more" were Unix !
tail -f FTW.
Still haven't worked out what "§" does.
@@lewis72 That's the section symbol, also called the stacked s. It's mainly used to mark different sections of an article, usually in legal documents, and I'm pretty sure it's never actually used in programming or command line use.
@@lewis72 It's there for legal reasons :-)
Fast forward a few decades and now the exclamation mark is also used for "logical NOT"
\exists ! god
mathematician are monotheist, and programmers are atheist
@@zzzzzzzzzzzspaf having spent my last two weeks typesetting every homework of mine I wish I didn't get this joke
@@KyttaIsHere could you explain the joke? I'm assuming LaTeX but I've never used it
@@victorsmith509 the command `\exists !` renders "∃!", which basically means "there exists only one". So the joke is implying that for mathematicians "!" means uniqueness when for programmers it's "negation". Hence the religion bit: there is one God for mathematicians and no God for programmers
@@KyttaIsHere "!" in maths means 'factorial'.
Fascinating, I always like weirdish documentaries explaining things I wouldn't be bothered to google about. T'was interesting my good man.
Just like technology connections? He made a new episode on his toaster series
Exactly I've always been curious but not enough to go down the rabbit hole on Google,
@@Honeybearsphone How many times have I hear "rabbit hole" in the last year or so? I won't, er, Google it!
SEGACD32XMODEL1 Yes, exactly like Technology Connections lol. Though a toaster was the first piece of electronics I took apart and repaired when I was very young way back when, which kicked off an interest in electronics and later computers that threw me into a 25-year IT career.
Doesn’t mean I would have thought to research toasters _now_ , though lol.
Agent J ?? What’s this about the world being rational?
The ! being used as the logical or hurts my modern programmer brain.
Logical NOT, and it still is! It's the standard in C and C-influenced languages. != not-equals. Etc.
@@greenaum Someone didn't watch the video :D
That's the point! Everyone is used to '!' being logical NOT nowadays, but at some point it was used for the logical OR. That's why it hurts my modern programmer brain.
! is "NOT" is it not? I've seen | used as or and pipe. But I use more OSes than DOS.
Indeed. Everyone knows ! means logical/boolean not. When ^ is not (which is markedly less common than ! being not), it's usually bitwise. Another character sometimes used for not, is ~
@@0LoneTech LOL, you have no idea how dumb i'm feeling right now, my Portuguese keyboard does not have this key, and for that reason for years i installed two keyboard languages and i would always have to press "crtl shift" to change the language, press the "|" key twice and press "crtl shift" again every time
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.
To pipe, or to partial pipe? That is the question we ASCII.
Sorry, I really couldn't help myself. Neat video!
Hi dad!
ASCII a stupid question get a stupid ANSI.
@@user-pi5xz5je4y Well done! That actually got an audible laugh from me.
dear god i need a snorkel the dad joke levels are so high
Neeeeeerrrrrrd!!!
(Homer Simpson)
Funny though.
Linux still uses the pipe.
Bash and other shells (also present on Mac OSX) all do.
But they key legend says ¦ , not | on a standard ansi layout which I guess is whats this video is partly about (havent watched it yet)
@@pleggli Ive understood that ¦ and | are the same. like using linux ive used "legacy" terminals (due to nvidia graphics drivers being finicky) where when ive typed | ive gotten ¦, and they behaved exactly the same.And wikipedia says they are same so, ive taken that as gospel -> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar#Solid_vertical_bar_vs_broken_bar
Its so useful that on my nordic keyboard I have it on three places
@@alfredwingate4237 But they are not the same symbol and 'echo foo ¦ cat' on any utf capable terminal will probably just print 'foo ¦ cat' unless some shells use both for pipes.
That is not where the name “pound sign” of # comes. # was used for lbs. as early as the 1830s in the United States.
I agree. See my comment somewhere else on this page.
lbs wouldn't be Libras? also isn't £ a stylized L because of Libra?
where the name "pound" comes from?
Meanwhile back in the era of the Romans...
@@rogercruz1547 It comes from the Romans. IIRC a pound (weight) of silver defined a pound (money). Being from Latin and about weight, Libra is where the L comes from.
Don't get me started about pounds (force)... 🤦♂️
@@rogercruz1547 in my country libras means pounds
I was familiar with using pipe due to being a Linux user, but I had no idea about its history.
And you still don't.
@@1pcfred That's a pretty dumb assumption considering the comment you replied to is from 7 months ago lol
@@thespider7898 if all you're going by is this video then it is an accurate assumption.
@@1pcfred You'd be hard pressed to find any one video that entirely explains the history of anything, I had done further research before writing even the original comment.
Besides, this video does give an "idea of the history" which is all my comment said. Go be aggressively ignorant elsewhere lol.
@@thespider7898 good for you. Videos are poor sources of information.
Next, talk about how IBM bodged the *Alt* key, making it necessary to split them into *Alt* and *Alt* *Gr* in Europe.
That's when every other platform with Alt/Option keys can use both of them for symbols (Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, etc..) even when typing on a US keyboard.
In the U.S. there's the left ALT and the right ALT. Where the right ALT is just CTRL + left ALT.
Check out the space cadet keyboard....more shift keys than anything
@@hrgwea Depends on the OS mapping really. AltGr and Right Alt both use the same scan code in the keyboard; US standard treats it as Right Alt while US Intl treats it as AltGr. Right Alt was never a Ctrl-chord and does not generate a Ctrl bit otherwise Ctrl + Alt-chords would not work properly or uniformly across the keyboard which is pretty silly.
With the power of *NIX, I have my Right Alt preferentially mapped as AltGr in X, and the Menu key as a Compose since it's BS that US keyboards don't typically have them either.
To this day, I still don't know the difference between Alt and Alt Gr.. other than the fact that Alt Gr + escape gives this: ¦ meanwhile the Alt (regular) doesn't... I also don't know if | and ¦ actually have any different functionality. I literally only use || to represent OR in programming or, as mentioned in the video, a single | for separation... I could look it up, but I don't really care enough to find out.
Alt Gr also exists in Latin America.
6:33 - I pretty certain that's not the reason why Americans refer to # as the pound key. The weight pound (lb) shares the same symbol, therefore it was used as a number designator & a weight designator in America. It was never used to denote the British £ (currency).
Yeah. growing up all my life "#" was the symbol I saw associated with weight. I've also heard it referred to as the "number key".
I refer to it as the “tick,tack,toe” symbol.
I'm American, and I couldn't tell you why # is called the pound key, but I do know that in the United States, even to this day, if you dial an automated telephone line, and need to enter numbers, the voice will say something to the line of 'please enter your pin number followed by the pound sign' of course, on telephone dialers here we have the Asterisk * (sometimes called Star) and the 'Pound' # on each side of the 0.
It's definitely from the weight. # is a actually digraph of lb.
@@lwvmobile The asterisk on a phone is not sometimes called star, it is called star.
The # symbol has been used for centuries as an abbreviation for pound. You can see it used in sales and labeling for weights back in the 1800's.
Sure, we have lb as an abreviation. But you would see, and still do to this day, # being used.
For example, "25# Box of Nail"
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 love the split pipe! ¦D I use it in emoticons so much that I made a point of putting it on my custom-made keyboard layout so that I could use it without the need to input alt+0166 all the time. ¦3 I put it on altgr+|. When you said that having it on the same key as | was arguably worse, I was like, "No way! That is, like, the perfect spot for it!" ›¦D
this is the first time I've seen someone using the split pipe for emoticons, I love your implementation. I know basically nothing about the topic but I have some research to do, I 100% will copy your idea!
@@ahreuwu Thanks! ¦D I feel quite confident that it is an emoticon innovation that I can legitimately claim to have invented. I've never seen or heard of anyone else ever doing it either, but I've been doing it for many years now. Have fun using it. ♥
@@clara_cross split pipe takeovet let's go >¦D
@@visagemsc Yaaaas! Let's goooo! ›¦D
Interesting video, but I think I'm in the "more confused" category now.
🤔
Standards are like that. If you aren't completely confused by the time you finish reading the document, then the standards committee has failed.
Check out the C++ standards sometime.
@@jeffspaulding9834 I had a few friends that knew C++ in high school (I graduated in 2002).
I asked my best friend, and fellow guitarist in our band, if he would teach me how to "hack."
He declined. I asked him if he thought I wasn't smart enough to do it. He basically told me that I was "smart" enough to do it, but he didn't trust that I wouldn't get myself into trouble if he taught me! 🤣
He was a really good friend, so after that discussion, I decided to focus my efforts elsewhere.
Scrambles the Death Dealer Getting into trouble is half the fun! Done while growing up, anyway.
@@filminginportland1654 Oh, I know, believe me!
That just meant that my crimes were more "physical" than "digital..."
(Drugs, a little fight here and there, etc.)
*Edit: My dumbass didn't really get into much trouble until I was legally considered an adult...
😑
@@filminginportland1654 We also enjoyed playing loud music (like with instruments and mics and stuff), skateboarding, and lighting stuff on fire/blowing stuff up!
🤣
17:55 "So as a recap..."
Clever man.
Every QWERTZ keyboard I remember seeing has it shown as a broken bar, and it's the Alt-GR option on the < and > key, which is the same lower left one, but it actually types the solid bar. We don't have a second bar as far as I'm aware, the top left one is used for ^ and °.
My Qwertz keyboard shows it as a connected bar.
Also the top left character is '^' and '°'
Or, as the French would say: *Ceci* *n'est* *pas* *une* *pipe*
Am I being picky if I point out that Magritte was Belgian?
Your comment amused me either way.
@@JordanMilly It works!
Tres bien, mon collegue d'internette!
@@mapleflowervt And a French letter is an English letter. Over there, that is.
@@mapleflowervt Oooh!
Americans don't call it the pound symbol in reference to the unit of currency, but rather in reference to the unit of weight. It's not in common use anymore, but you can still find "#" used as weight markings on old packaging and in old documents.
I work at a print shop, can confirm # is still used for weight symbols on paper packaging.
German here, and "#" is called "pfund" (~pound) when its used as a unit of weight and "hashtag" for more or less anything else. So, it's not only Americans
Just to complete the circle, one pound sterling was once the value of 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.
This was a fascinating comment thread to go through. Worth a screenshot imo
Noted. Added to pinned comment.
Me, presented with a foreign keyboard
"Now where could my pipe be?"
The Yambino
only US KEYB, only getting bugs and errors if you use other standards.
fck that UN demanding local warlords!
Normally I like to think I can keep up with these videos pretty well but this one made my head spin.
Table @ 2:40 has 16 rows (not 15) giving total of 64 characters, which can be represented with 6 bits.
Also, your reference at 6:33 as to why the '#' symbol is called the 'pound' is incorrect. The '#' symbol had been used to represent pounds since as far back as 1850, long before the advent of these characters sets.
Indeed, its origin is well known. It's a ligature, like the &, and literally denotes pounds averdupois, a weight. It's used as such regularly. The packages of meat at the supermarket where I shop are marked 1#, 2#, and 3#.
Corrections pinned.
When did this end in America? Everyone over 30 in the US knows it as the pound sign but everyone under doesn't even understand that it can be used instead of "lbs".
@@johnpettet I don't know if it did. I am 30 my self. I talk to a lot of teenagers (it's basically my job), and me referring to it as a pound sign I don't believe has caused any issues, but I'll specifically test this.
@@johnpettet # looks similar to an old handwritten version of lb
3:27 That was actually RUBOUT, meaning “ignore this character”.
Of course, not to be confused with the expression "rub one out"
So glad I watched this with subtitles. Not just because my grasp of computer programming is superficial at best but also because they're hilarious.
The pipe symbol comes in handy when creating delimited files and the data can contain spaces, commas, tabs, etc. Some systems like Fiserv's APL use it (at least back when I used it). I sometimes use it in Excel to search for values and replace them with something I know won't be in the data elsewhere. Can combine that with functions like text to columns.
a) they do not exist, at least on my keyboard
b) they should exist at least for latex typing, I would need them
Are you talking about the | symbol? I find it quite useful for separating information in CZcams video titles. For example: $20 laptop from eBay | Was it worth it?
@@FSM_Reviews I meant the broken one, it's missing from my keyboard and I would need it for the "choose" math notation
Never have seen or heard about those symbols before.I wish I still had the keyboard from the Pentium IIs wherethey might have been.
@@vHindenburg I just checked and my vista PC had the broken pipe, in place of the full one. Obviously I can't use my vista PC for math class, especially since I'd need the vista pc for statistics and the w10 pc for absolute values.
it's also the pipe symbol on dos, *nix
"...explained something you never cared about"? Nah, explained something I didn't know I cared about until now.
Nicely said
As someone who has worked intimately with the ASCII and ASCII II character sets for over 50 years, I found this series of factual reveals most instructive. Thankyou Sir.
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!
(14:45) Technically, the key above the enter key is moved to the left of enter on the ISO keyboard, with the extra key being left of Z. So if you use a US (ANSI) keyboard set to the UK layout, pressing the key above the enter key will act as the key left of enter, not the one left to Z.
We all know the value of the pipe symbol in making forward arrows on minecraft signs.
16:42 what keyboard is that with the parallelogram keys? Its amazing!
You have made my day. I remember PL/I. My first programming language - in college, cause I'm really old - was PL/C, which we viewed as PL/I with training wheels. My 2nd language was Assembly for the IBM-370 and my 3rd was FORTRAN. In my final year, I learned C on Unix. The class was divided into 4 groups - 3 using PL/I or FORTRAN and 1 using C, which only 1 guy knew. That was lucky as in my professional career it translated eventually into C++ and now C#. A very memorable moment from college, which encapsulates the rapid pace of innovation in the world of computers at the time, was when my professor walked in and told us that someone had just managed to get an entire computer onto a single board. As for this particular video of yours, I'm sure in some class I learned what ASCII stood for but I guarantee I never cared at the time except that it was needed to pass a test. A memorable moment post-college was touring one of the museums in Wash. DC and seeing a unit of core memory. In my 1st college programming class, the prof had passed around a piece of the mesh that core memory was made from. But the unit in the museum was a full-up unit that was in service until just a couple of years earlier. This would have been probably in the 80s or early 90s. The prof presented it as being used in the early days of computers so by the time I saw the real cabinet of the stuff was like seeing a wooly mammoth walking beside a Tesla. I hope you have a Patreon account because frankly, this is the ONLY channel I have EVER wanted to pay for (and I'm subscribed to over 350 channels). Sorry this is so long but your channel will be playing all day today while I fight with code.
# is called the "pound key" by Americans and Canadians because it was derived from a ligature for pounds, ℔, and has been read as "pound" in phone numbers long before ASCII was standardized.
Canadians *are* Americans
@@Rogue_Leader fuck off mate.
In the most literal sense, one could argue Canadians are American in that they are from the Americas. However in the colloquial and more standard sense, American is used to refer exclusively to people from the United States of America.
Many Canadians, myself included, find such a callous disregard for Canada's existance to be incredibly frustrating.
@@onicx4603 So you are americans
@@nadirjofas3140 Only in the way that Greenlanders, Mexicans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Brazilians, Chilians, Argentinians, Bolivians, Peruvians, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Hondurans, etc. are Americans.
In the most meaningless way possible, yes. In any meaningful sense or in the way that the term is typically construed, no.
@@onicx4603 So it has meaning
You could have avoided making this entire video essay if you'd just invoked `more readme.txt`.
That's too easy.
@@Nostalgianerd True
`less` is better since you can scroll back up (though unsure if that exists in DOS)
@@dragos240alt It doesn't, annoyingly.
@@dragos240alt Less is greater than more! Hence the name. ;o)
This episode was actually super informative, thanks for going into such depth! ❤️
Great video I'm always looking for ways to be more pedantic in my typing style and vocabulary and you just gave me some hours of explanation for the uninitiated. Thank you.
Brits: "# is a hash symbol!"
'Muricans: "No! # is a pound sign!"
Composers: "# is a sharp, you dullards."
EDIT: Oh my god, what has my dumb joke started!? xD
I've heard it called "lumber yard" :-þ
I call all it an octothorpe
nope, it's actually a waffle
Actually, this is sharp: ♯
Programmers: Actually it's the start of a comment (in shell scripts and python at least)
GNU/Linux user here. It's still needed.
yes, "if [ $something ] || [ $notsomething ].."
@@tachalorah more like "ls -A | grep -i dwarffortress"
The solid bar, the broken bar seems to be interpreted as a name.
@@Supertimegamingify haha, i forgot that "| grep" :)
It's also still needed by anyone who uses any programming language with an "OR" logic operator, as "OR" has generally been represented by two pipes. Or in other words, anything that isn't bootable ASM.
Thank you for this - very interesting! Like others, I've seen | as broken and unbroken but wasn't aware of the history. Very useful to break up text too, as you have in the title. Keep up the great work!
4:23 The logical OR symbol is ∨ (line 8 in the first column). The | is the Sheffer stroke, representing the NAND operator.
^ is now used for XOR
@@kjl3080 Where and by whom? The symbols I know for XOR are ⊕, ⩛ and ⊻. I've never seen ∧ being used for anything else than the AND operator.
EDIT: indeed, you are right, the caret ^ is used in C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP and Python for denoting the bitwise XOR, that is a most unfortunate choice by the language designers (I guess K&R are to blame for this one).
@@koenlefever K&R didn't make pipe for or up for C; they inherited it (and ampersand for and) from BCPL. Its predecessor CPL used traditional logic symbols ∧ and ∨, ≠̲ (underlined not equal) was used for xor. BCPL used the word XOR for xor, so I guess we can blame C for the caret use.
Edit: Yep, Ken Thompson confirmed it was simply one of the few characters not already in use: softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/331388/why-was-the-caret-used-for-xor-instead-of-exponentiation
@@0LoneTech Most interesting, thanks.
I can't help wondering what programming environment makes NAND available to you so readily! I've always confused ∨ vs ∧ (and also ∪ vs ∩), and find them to be unfortunate glyph choices. I've just found ⊎, and you've shown me ⊕ as good substitutes.
"share not Cher" LOL I always appreciate some dry humor among facts =)
I always thought the broken vertical bar was made to distinguish it from a lowercase “l”
That may be the reason IBM disagreed with the amended standard. In my comment's font, the bar extends below the baseline, so it's longer than "l"
|¦I
Watching the cursor blink dutifully as it waits for you to type the command wrong so it can give you a syntax error really brings me back.
Another GREAT documentary about computer hardware history. I recommend watching this video. Thank You!
On my steelseries apex 350 keyborad, I have three unbroken bars on different keys. One next to the "1" key, one next to "left shift" and one next to "backspace".
Same here with my Corsair K70 (Scandinavian layout)
@ArktinenPeikko Yeah, mine is scandinavian too. I wonder if this is unique to certain Scandinavian keyboards or something like that.
@@magnushmann Same deal on my scandinavian keyboard; my 3 bars have different colours: white next to shift, green next to 1, and blue next to backspace.
@BertyFromDK Classic. Do you happen to know the model?
@@magnushmann Yes, it's a Deltaco TB-122 rev. 5 wireless model - btw i've swapped the Æ and Ø keycaps as they were placed according to the swedish standard layout, now they are placed according to the danish std. ;)
Then there's the CRLF line ending convention where ASCII 0x0d is just a frickin line printer command that we are still holding onto for a decade after the last line printer went offline.
@Gernot Schrader wat? I don't think we're talking about the same thing here. CRLF in text just has to go. Causes problems, has no benefits, and even the reason it began was stupid. Printer drivers should have injected any necessary CR commands instead of polluting the original data with printer commands.
If you want to use it for some kind of half-baked low level sub format encoding, more power to you. I don't care about that.
@@TheIronSavior Then use Unix or Linux, those only use LF in stead of CRLF - which introduced the need of the "dos2unix" (for Sun, or "dos2ux" for HP, or "to_unix" for SGI, as those are not standard Unix commands) and "unix2dos" commands to convert between those formats. Also, when CRLF was introduced, "printer drivers" did not yet exist: LF made the paper roll move and CR made the printer head move. (By the way, my first computer only used CR in stead of CRLF and the "Enter" key was the "CR" key.)
@@koenlefever IIRC the Enter key is still officially called 'carriage return'.
*laughs in government systems*
@@koenlefever You're right in saying that only Unix/Linux and derivatives use LF for line endings. It's not just for files, all text-based network protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP etc.) use CR+LF.
That sound at the start of the video. Brought back childhood memories.
Thank you
I just remember in keyboarding class finding that holding out plus keypad numbers like art +2 to5 was ß along with other symbols seemed date but now I see they came from a chart of some sort which is really cool! Thanks for the videos, cheers!
Holy crap. I've been staring at keyboards with 'Alt Gr' or some other distinction between the alt keys for most of my life, and I have never once realised why.
I just tested it on the keyboard I'm currently using (which, coincidentally is a UK keyboard, though I no longer live there).
The only labelled '3rd' character is the key in the top left. (actually not true the euro symbol € also shows up explicitly)
`¬¦
Sure enough, it does what is mentioned in the video.
However, out of curiosity, I tried some other keys.
Here's the ones that gave results;
4$€
eEé
uUú
iIí
oOó
aAá
~#\ (this one is weird and surprising, given the redundancy)
... I don't feel like testing function or other keys, but... Wow.
all this time...
XD
My main grief with the Alt Gr keys is that there's only one, except on Apple keyboards. This is not always a big issue, but try to code in a curly bracket language on a Hungarian keyboard, preferably one that requires semicolons for each line ending. That will result in very awkward keyboard usage.
@@ZILtoid1991 Same on the German layout. Curly brackets and these layouts don't really like each other. Keep pressing the wrong buttons and writing {) or (}
It's kind of hard to miss the function of the Alt Gr key if you're a Scandinavian, due to how many commonly used symbols are locked under the Alt Gr modifier - @, £, $, €, {, [, ], }, \, ~ and | all require an Alt Gr combination. Essentially, any time you write an e-mail, have to use a currency symbol, try to type up a folder name with its path, or do any programming, you need the Alt Gr key. The thing is though, the major Scandinavian standards organizations didn't agree on where to put the \ and | keys, so my "Scandinavian universal" keyboard has three keys with a | on them, and three with the \... and the sets overlap, with one key having both symbols. (and neither of them work in my language.)
The great tragedy is that Windows's keyboard layouts don't make better use of Alt Gr. On macOS, the default American and British layouts (among others!) together with the Alt/Option key can type all sorts of wonderful things: ¡€#¢∞§¶•ªº-≠⁄™‹›fifl‡°·‚-±œ∑áéíóú®†¥äëïöüâêîôûøπ“‘Œ„‰ÂÊÁËÈØ∏”’åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æ«ÅÍÎÏÌÓÔÒÚÆ»àèìòùΩ≈ç√∫ñãõµ≤≥÷ŸÛÙÇ◊ıˆ˜¯˘¿
It's something you just don't think about if you live in a country that needs it and doesn't bother anyone who doesn't use it I guess.
I'm Irish so I had to use it for fadas in school and today it's really just for euro signs
0:00 [CC] "[Resplendent intro sounds]"
Indeed they are.
I really enjoyed this video and whilst I have been using computers for 35 years there was plenty of cool history and stuff to learn here thanks for the excellent overview. screen reading software reads these characters as "Bar" or "Broken Bar" and I always wondered which was which and why.
fascinating and i watched right to the end. I also had your PC setup in work for a short time. loads of ICL Ergo Pro monitors attached to new Compaq PC's depending on who moved desks or brought new kit during local government reorg!
You never mentioned EBCDIC by name! It was very important in mainframes. On my 2019 Dell wireless keyboard (US), there is only a solid bar and a DOS window shows a solid bar.
"Or youtubers can use it to separate sections in their video titles" ... guilty! lol
I piped this video to my vintage computer play list, it is no longer confusing what key I should use to do that. Thank you Nostalgia Nerd!
On my Uk keyboard, the two keys are the wrong way around? the broken one is in the bottom left? But when typed it comes up as a solid vertical line and visa versa for the other one?
On german keyboards, I only have one non-broken bar in the bottom left next to Y (where amercian Z is) / on the right of shift
BUT the mindfuck im having now is: Americans dont have this huge "2 story" Enter key? wtf?
To get the "broken pipe", just hold down the Alt key and type 221 on the numeric keypad, then release Alt. Voilá: ¦
The real mindfuck is: why has every key on a german keyboard been translated to German (Ctrl has become Strg for Steuerung, Scroll Lock has become Rollen - which is means exactly the opposite of scroll lock, Alt has become Alt for Alternativ - but "alt" is also the German word for "old")...except Esc and Enter. Especially Enter...because it correlated to a real german word. Yep, we Germans have a key that suggest that it performs an authorized boarding of a hostile ship.
@@klausstock8020 I mean Eingabetaste is a little bit wooden.
@@vHindenburg Also meine ist aus Plastik.
Waste of space IMO, and you can have your | where it belongs
Even back in the mid 80s never liked the euro style giant enter key
@@z0phi3l I mean use what you like most :)
From my point of view (And what daniel said) its easy to hit without looking, similar how spacebar is huge af
Nostalgia Nerd: "|" keys shouldn't exist
Also Nostalgia Nerd: uses "|" in title
Well, ¦ shouldnt, | should.
@@Senekha86 I always thought it was the same symbol just in different fonts. My keyboard has it split on the key itself, but when I enter it into a router's CLI it shows up as a solid.
@@nthgth Same for me on german keyboards, and I thought exactly the same. Its really a strange leftover.
Excellent information Sir!
Thanks! I love learning things, especially learning about things that are right under my nose (that I didn't know much about). But... though it's been awhile since I did much in DOS, I do not recall any commands involving the "|" symbol. I do recall that - for listings longer than a screen page, I was taught to use "PRINT C:\xyz\p", where xyz is whatever you're listing, and /p is the 'page switch' (which simply causes it to print one screen page at a time, pausing until you hit ENTER, which causes it to list the next screen page). If I'm slightly inaccurate here, I apologize. As I said, it's been awhile. But I know for a fact that there was such a /p command; I used it many times for listing DIR contents. tavi.
I just looked at my keyboard's pipe key only to discover it's an unbroken bar!
Most are these days.
NO WAY! i never noticed the pipe key on my keyboard is also a broken bar!
It seems to go either way, my keyboard is only a year old and has a broken bar.
my newer one (win7) is. my older ones (win98 and the old DOS IBM PC XT portable) have a broken one
the broken bar is certainly more distinct. A simple vertical line might be mistaken for a capital I or just mentally discarded for lack of interest
You're wrong about the crossover between the # and calling it a "pound" sign. ;) The symbol has been used in cookbooks to describe the unit of measurement for centuries
Not only cookbooks, but also handwritten sales receipts long before computers existed.
@@bobriemersma I doubt that was the intention, but ya can't argue with results lol
Also you don't use the UK pound symbols for weight ..
I still sometimes get confused when I'm on a phone call and and need to enter numbers followed by the "pound" key, I'm like wtf is that, it's a hash key lol
Thanks for dissecting that. I always wondered why there are sometimes broken bars and sometimes not and why there are two of them.
I am more confused than before though
Thanks I really appreciated this video and actually learned something very useful that I was curious about. 👍
Meanwhile on the German Keyboard: When coding, you regularly break your hand as you need AltGr and 7 to type {
I'm french and i feel you
Why don't you use Ctrl-Alt-7 instead?
"Oh" is not a numerical character, zero or naught should be used as the name of the name for the numerical character.
My reason for being so pedantic about this, is because, in the early 1980s, I was working as a systems engineer and was on a customer site restoring a system and needed enter a special code to perform the restoration. The person at the other end of the phone line kept on saying "oh" when he should have been saying "zero". This caused a huge amount of time wasted and angst on the part of customers.
There's a similar issue with people who learned to type on a type writer who were used to use the lower case L to type a one.
Thanks again for clarifying how IBM kept disrupting keyboards,. ASCII, and etc since 1977.
This video gave me SO MANY ANSWERS! Thank you, i really loved it
The world: we need a standard code set
CBM: Hold my beer
What's the bizarre keyboard at 16:41?
seems like kensington 64331 comfort type
Looks like some kind of "ergonomic" keyboard.
I always wondered why some keyboards have a pipe key close to the left shift, some have it replacing part of the enter key, and my keyboard I'm writing on right now has the key left of the backspace (backspace is half the usual width). I think it's the only key I've seen in so many places, but never seen it close to the 1 key before ;)
I know what the pipe symbol/character is for but what's the 'other one' for (on the key to the left of 1) ? Does it work as pipe too in DOS ?
Linux sysadmins use almost every "nostalgic" symbol to keep your CZcams, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google.... your Internet alive.
Never ceases to amaze me how much critical infrastructure is, in fact, just a series of |
The first broken vertical bar is also known as James Bond Compromised.
I learned touch typing in 1980 and every year through the 80s there was a new keyboard layout. On any given day of work, I would use 2 or 3 keyboards with different layouts. It was kind of frustrating, but backspace on computers made it more forgiving than the type writers. Now I know why! Wow!
Great explanation of something I had never even noticed! Thanks
So if the negate symbol and exclamation mark shared a spot in old ascii, is that why exclamation point is used for ‘not’ in programming languages?
I'm going to guess that the "not" symbol just became synonymous with the exclamation mark. I was wondering the same thing
I think ! was supposed to be the or | symbol at the time. But that was just a kludge to make that guy stop complaining.
! and | shared the same spot, and so did ^ and the negation symbol. In regular expressions, ^ is used as negation in a character range, like [^abc] for not (a, b or c). Now I understand why.
That's the legacy of the B programming language, which was created on PDP-7. Since PDP-7 was made by DEC, not IBM, and therefore didn't run PL/I, it didn't have to provide those alternate character shapes. When Thompson and Ritchie created B, they couldn't pick ¬, so they picked !.
@@vytah Thompson and Ritchie created C
Take a shot every time he says "bar". It's about bar, after all.
If you want to check your character set's look:
007C: |
00A6: ¦
I've typed these with the Linux Ctrl+Shift+U keycombo and typing the hex numbers after that, confirming with Enter.
To do the same on Windows hold down the Alt key and type the (decimal? octal?) number on the numpad, then release the Alt key again.
You can also go into keyboard settings, select the international keyboard, and use "alt.-gr." + "shift" + "\" to get A6
@@Persun_McPersonson
I disn't know that, when I'm back at my PC I'll try it.
Thanks for the confusion, you explained it well
No you cant have it.. I need my pipe operator.
They already stole ed.exe and replaced it with that weird GUI thing called notepad :S XD
No need for ed/edlin:
copy con foo.txt
This is a message.
CTRL+Z
@@Ichinin OMG! You just taught me something. I havent felt that feeling in years XD
(I was probably taught this, lets be honest... but the next words out of my teachers mouth were probably "or use ed" XD)
If I remember right, to create simple text files Id just use:
echo message here > foo.txt
(Your way is better)
@@ihateevilbill I prefer your way since it works on DOS as well as *nix since `echo` and `>` do the same thing on both kinds of systems.
I'm curious which ed you're referring to, as DOS didn't include one. The most likely candidate appears to be the WordPerfect editor. edlin was always a sad excuse compared to unix ed.
@@0LoneTech This was about 30 years ago, but if I remember right the editor was called "E". It came with PC-DOS. Theres a really high chance that i renamed it to ed.exe as e.exe looked like a virus name to me at the time (plus its easier to remember ed.exe to edit things) XD But youre correct, ed.exe (the real one) was by wordperfect.
Basically all I meant was that I liked my dos environment :)
I swear you just made a new key appear on my keyboard
I've seen CSVs which used multiple separators for different compositions of data. '=' for key-value pairs, '=' with '#' for maps, '|' (non-broken pipe) for additional information, and you guessed it '¦' (broken pipe) for a different kind of additional information. I was literally deskpalming when I saw that.
I remember vaguely that High ASCII (mentioned around 13:30) is the upper half of the 256 character table, starting at 0x80. Low ASCII is the "standard" latin character set, that you can see on the keyboard (from 0x20 which is simply a space, to 0x7F which is a backspace), minus the first two rows that are reserved codes (null, beep, vertical and horizontal tabs, and so on). The High ASCII part was heavily modified between codepages to fit the extra characters that came with other languages.
Imagine using an escape character ( \ ) for directory paths
*laughs with every OS that isn't Windows*
Well, considering / is a command line parameter, I guess it kinda balances out?
I mean, why would you put that in a URL? ;p
Also, What other OSes?
It's pretty much just 6 million varieties of unix nowadays. XD
So it's _one_ other OS, dressed up in a bunch of weird costumes...
I mean, I could pull out something obscure, like Atari DOS, but that doesn't even support directories, so it's kinda moot.
@@KuraIthys
1. Fair
2. It's in URL because it also is supposed to denote location, "root_dir/sub/file" and "site.io/sub/page"
3. Fair
4. Anyway here some OSs that aren't just Unix: Plan9, Haiku
Actually Windows has it wrong, but what do I know, I just prefer that Unix standard
@@KuraIthys you're being pedantic, you know that the only OS that really matters for pratical reasons are Linux,*BSDs, MacOS and Win.
It's a case of whilst everyone else thinks forwards / Microsoft goes backwards \
So is this "|" symbol on my German Model M from 1990 actually a broken bar that's displayed as a solid bar, or a solid bar displayed as a solid bar? I'm confused.
EDIT: I looked it up, it's 0x7C.
Dude! What is that Keyboard @16:41 with the Diagonal and lozenge shaped keys? Thanks!
Also, just out of interest, did you like the Sinclair QL Keyboard?
Thanx for the confusing clarification ;-). I always enjoy your investigations of "why-is-it-so" matters (y).
4:18-5:46 It's a shame really, that important symbols like ≠, ≡, ≥, ≤, ... were replaced by those old fashioned control codes. ASCII was one of the worst mistakes in computer history, as I see it, which was realized by many already in the 1970s-80s. Sadly, unicode (or any of it's predecessors) didn't manage to take over until the early 2000s. Probably thanks to the clever UTF-8 coding.
if they would've landed in ASCII, maybe we would have them on our keyboards now and they even could've landed in programming languages (instead of things like =/= or !=). it's really a pity, it would be more useful for everyone.
@@gregthwuen Indeed. International languages like Algol 60, Algol 68, and some others, could use many symbols that were common on computers before ASCII became the norm. Sadly, influential americans wanted their own Fortran and C instead.
The ≠ sign is slowly coming back though. Just five-six years ago, people producing contents or commenting on CZcams still typically used the peculiar "==" and "!=" from the C-syntax. Today, ≠ is actually more common, as well as a correct usage of the equality symbol.
@@herrbonk3635 I guess it's because of the smartphone software keyboards featuring these keys again. It's a really good change, also from a typographical point of view.
@@gregthwuen Yes, it has probably helped a lot. We are finally leaving the dark ages of computers, so to speak.
Herr Bönk within code == and = do have specific different functions; obviously should not carry over into ordinary, written English
Sadly , Now YT will bombard me with 36 videos a day about fonts and keyboards
Good
Really awesome. Love this character set history stuff.
I love content like this. How about a followup video about the codepage hell before Unicode? Or all the different keyboard layouts?
On my desk here two Dell laptops with UK keyboards that have broken and an unbroken bar, a Logitech keyboard with two keys with unbroken bar above backslash (one beside left shift, one above right shift) and my favourite, the original Microsoft Natural US keyboard with only a single unbroken bar (between enter and backspace).