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

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

Maurits [MSFT] — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 04:31:19 GMT

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.

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

Maurits [MSFT] — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 01:41:56 GMT

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."

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

Maurits [MSFT] — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:19:27 GMT

> 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.

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

Martin Kochanski — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:27:46 GMT

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.

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

Gabe — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 00:55:44 GMT

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.

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

Ben Cooke — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 16:58:02 GMT

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!)

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

John Elliott — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 15:31:36 GMT

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.

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

orcmid — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 03:07:26 GMT

It's all coming back to me (and thank heavens for digital libraries that go way back).

The first ASCII (ANS X3.4-1963) was defined in a 7-bit code, but there were 29 undefined code points. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/366707.367524

The lower-case letters were not defined yet, nor were any of the special characters in the same sticks as the lower case letters. There were also 4 control-code positions in the top (7/12-7/15) positions. Keep in mind that having a 4-bit subset and a good 6-bit (64-character) subset was important at that time. Also think EBCDIC 64-character subsets with "|" and "¬" already tucked in there. Think PL/I programming.

When the filled-out code was being proposed and brought out for public comment, the situation was rather different. The vertical bar was proposed for 7/14, there was a "¬" in 7/12 (but called overbar with a hook for readability), the tilde was in 6/12 and carat was in 6/14. There were some pretty amazing intermediate stages, documented in http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/363831.363839

In the rearrangement before X3.4-1968 was completed and agreed to, the back-slash arrived and the organization became what it is now. The vertical bar became broken so that a 64-point subset could have vertical bar as a substitute for ! as lobbied for by IBM. In ISO 646-1973 the tilde disappeared and the overbar (without the hook) ended up at code point 7/14. I don't think I ever saw that used, but I can't verify that X3.4-1968 went directly to tilde at 7/14.

It helps to remember that while all of this was being figured out, most computer memory organizations and printer/display capabilities made 6-bit character codes the norm. There were few peripheral units that provided for more characters than that and I never saw a punched card with lower-case codes on it, though I'm sure there were some.

Although EBCDIC had been introduced (along with System/360's 8-bit bytes), it was a sparse 8-bit code and the telecommunication folk were having none of it. It took minicomputers and teletype terminals to bring ASCII into serious use for computing.

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

orcmid — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 02:01:59 GMT

Gabe was the closest on this one. And in a way, it was IBM's fault, but not the way you might think.

As I recall, the original ASCII specification, ANS X3.4-1968 had the broken bar, and so the keyboard committee (a different group) used it when the X4.22 and X4.23 keyboard standards were created. (I'd go look for it but I don't want to move off this page.)

The problem had to do with reserving the stylization of "!" being as "|" (for logical-or symbol) and of "^" as the logical not symbol, "¬". To allow for that, there could be no vertical bar already in the code and so position 7/12 got the broken bar.

I have this vague recollection that an objection from IBM was involved. There could have also been some concern that the 7/12 position was available for customization in international usage.

In the X3.4-1977 revision, it was observed that those stylizations never caught on and the idea was removed. Also, IBM hadn't implemented ASCII very much anyhow. (IBM's move to ASCII didn't start in earnest until introduction of the PC and Microsoft may deserve some credit here.) The vertical bar was restored to the 7/12 position in line with the International Reference version of ISO 646-1973. It appears that the keyboard standard "got stuck"

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

Vorn — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:39:56 GMT

my mac keyboard has an unbroken bar.

Vorn