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Two guys walked into a bar, but the bar was broken

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MSDN Blogs > Sorting it all Out > Two guys walked into a bar, but the bar was broken

Two guys walked into a bar, but the bar was broken

24 Feb 2006 4:01 AM
  • Comments 22

It was over a year ago that I pointed out in the post Keyboards: hardware vs. software how disconnected our team (which owns most of the keyboard layouts) and the hardware team (which owns most of the actual keyboard hardware) were.

And how impressive it was that we managed to be in sync so often, given that disconnect.

But it is possible I may live the rest of my life without being able to understand why almost every keyboard layout has a key which, when typed, will produce | (U+007c, a.k.a. VERTICAL LINE) yet printed upon the face of the key is ¦ (U+00a6, a.k.a. BROKEN BAR).

What's up with that?

It turns out that every single byte code page other 874 of the Windows code pages supports U+00a6, and every single Windows code page bar none (pardon the pun) supports U+007c.

And just about every font that has one has the other.

Even though in most cases (to get back to keyboards) almost every keyboard prints one on theface of a key but the matching layout has the other input.

So why this disconnect?

And more importantly, why does it persist?

And most important of all, why don't people complain? In either direction?

I suspect it is because no one really cares.

Or maybe is just that two guys can walk into a bar. Even if it looks like it is broken. Since it turns out they may still be serving drinks....

 

This post brought to you by "|" (U+007c, a.k.a. VERTICAL LINE)

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  • John Elliott
    25 Feb 2006 7:31 AM
    My recollection is that on Win95, the default UK options in Setup would select a UK keyboard and codepage 850; then in DOS windows the |\ key next to Shift produced character 0xDC (U+00A6, broken bar) not 0x7C (U+007C, vertical bar). And anyone who used it certainly did care, because it meant that pipe operators didn't work and you couldn't write C programs in a DOS IDE.
  • Ben Cooke
    25 Feb 2006 8:58 AM
    The question about the upper-case keycaps has reminded me that at my primary school (I'm not sure what the US equivalent of that is, but it's for children aged five to ten years) they had BBC Micros with sticky labels on all of the alphabetical keys and the lowercase letters written on. I guess this was because the younger children hadn't learned about uppercase characters yet.

    Now that computers are highly prevalent in schools, I wonder if they go to the effort of getting in lowercase-captioned keyboards or if they now just expect the kids to deal with it. After all, my old primary school — now largely refurbished and currently host to the next generation of my family — has several rooms devoted to computers, whereas in my day we had just roughly one per class of 30 children and they were generally just used to play educational computer games once in a blue moon. (I was "computer monitor" when I was seven or eight years old! Gotta start young!)
  • Gabe
    25 Feb 2006 4:55 PM
    My understanding of the 1967 decision was that PL/I users needed a vertical bar, and IBM's user group wanted it to be among the upper case letters because not everybody had lower case at the time. Since PL/I didn't use the exclamation mark, and it is essentially a vertical line, they said that you could make your exclamation mark look like a vertical bar. Of course then people with full 7-bit charsets would still have the real vertical bar character and the only way to visually tell them apart would be to have a hole in the U+7C character.

    Of course this was stupid and was fixed 10 years later, but IBM apparently never got the memo.
  • Martin Kochanski
    27 Feb 2006 4:27 PM
    If you download a search from Dialog, | is used to mark end-of-field and end-of-record, and ¦ is used to mark end-of-paragraph within a field.
  • 28 Feb 2006 4:19 PM
    > Uppercase letters ... inherited from typewriters.

    This then defers the question to "why are typewriter keys marked in upper-case even though (usually) you get a lower-case letter when you press them?"

    I was watching "Bumping into Broadway"
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0009973/

    ... and one of the early scenes shows a typewriter with SIX ROWS of keys.

    The three top rows are the capital letters, marked as such:
    QWERTYUIOP
    ASDFGHJKL
    ZXCVBNM

    and the bottom three rows are the lower case letters, also marked as such:
    qwertyuiop
    asdfghjkl
    zxcvbnm

    Also, the top three rows were black keys with white markings, and the bottom three were white keys with black markings.

    The movie was made in 1919, but the typewriter was very likely old even then... Harold Lloyd's character has some technical troubles and it ends up getting thrown out of a window.
  • 28 Feb 2006 5:41 PM
    It's all here:
    http://www.mytypewriter.com/generic.html?pid=21

    The first page has:
    "The Sholes and Gliden model, wrote capitals only, is the first for introducing the QWERTYT keyboard, which is still used in computer keyboard of today."

    The third page has:
    "Caligraph No. 1  was the second typewriter appeared on the US market in 1880 (shown on the right.) Its No. 2 model had a giant keyboard that featured both lower and upper cases rather than the shift key used on double-case machines from Remington."
  • 28 Feb 2006 8:31 PM
    It looked basically like this:
    http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/typewriters/caligraph.html

    The author of that page mentions that the capital letter Q is missing.  But the typewriter in the movie definitely had a capital Q.
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