These Keys Shouldn't Exist | Nostalgia Nerd
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- Опубліковано 21 лис 2024
- [Head to www.squarespac... 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.
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.)
I B M used (EBCDIC) instead of asci. In their mainframes. 73
To this day, I find my brain rejects the idea of calling this symbol "#" a "hash". I think it's related to the days when telephones had this symbol on their dial pads, and were called the "pound sign".
@@n.miller907 it's still a pound sign and always will be. In music it's a sharp. I can see playing Beethoven's moonlight sonata in C hash tag minor. Not on my time. 73
@@ronb6182Sharp is ♯ not #
@@ronb6182 LOL! Kinda rolls off the tongue though. 😁 I watched a university course on linguistics by John McWhorter. According to him, there are no solid rules for language. Everything is ad hoc. Even the way a word is pronounced can't be locked down. Based on that assumption, I guess when people "speak in tongues", they actually may be saying something concrete. LOL!
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;
¦\
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.
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.
in some programming languages "^" indicates inversion, which effectively is the same as "!", meaning logical not. Can't remember which language atm, only that I got massively confused, being used to languages based on C or Basic
@@Michallote That's what they were asking about. They're asking why this is the case
Don't forget "~", bitwise NOT. 😂
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
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.
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
@@NikitaKaramov 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
@@NikitaKaramov "!" in maths means 'factorial'.
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.
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 UA-cam, 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
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 |||
that's not a Danish keyboard, that's a Nordic keyboard. On a Danish keyboard there's only 1 of each character, in the correct place ( | next to backspace, \ together with < and > next to left shift). On a Nordic keyboard you have repeats of | and \ in three different places because it's made to support Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish at the same time, and our three languages have slightly different layouts despite using very similar character sets. This combined nordic layout is also why we have the confusing mess of ÆÖØ and ØÄÆ keys
@@thesteelrodent1796 It's also used in Finland, Finland uses the same Alphabet as in Swedish.
They likely are at different colors. The first one is for Denmark, the second for Sweden and Finland, and the third one for Norway. I find amazing how Denmark and Norway cannot agree on the layout. The letters Ø and Æ are in a different order.
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?
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'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"
Corrections in pinned comment.
"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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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!
🤣
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.
Comp Sci major here. Did my share of protocol conversion from obsolete formats for gubbmint and new knew any of this. Even used a teletype in college that used Baudot.
thanks for the video.
My kid is now doing software engineering and had questions about binary formats and I ran across this. Excellent, the process is important because everything seems like magic nowadays and hard to fathom how anybody got to the Unicode.
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
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
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 UA-cam 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
(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.
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)
🤷♂️
8:04 - That is particularly confusing since the circumflex ( ^ ) is actually the mathematical logic symbol for "and" and the exclamation mark ( ! ) would later become the symbol for "not".
Nope: the logical AND is ∧ (different from the circumflex ^), the logical OR is ∨ (from "vel" in Latin), and | is the logical NAND (a.k.a. Sheffer stroke).
@@koenlefever eeek ^ (shift 6 on my kb) was to me = of '**' for exponent ... ASCII = old & good (but clobbered)
@@koenlefever - "∧ (different from the circumflex ^)" - So you think there were TWO different circumflexes in early ASCII...? :) The whole subject of the video is how they were using the same character to represent multiple (similar) symbols.
@@RFC-3514 "So you think there were TWO different circumflexes in early ASCII...?" No, but I appreciate the pun :D. Look at 4:23 in the video, you'll see the logical AND at position 04, the logical OR at position 08, the NOT at position 16 (that's 16 in hexadecimal, or 22 in decimal), the NAND at 1B and the XNOR (equivalence) at 15. The diamond at position 1A is the modal operator "it is possible that". This character set does not have any accents at all: the set is designed with logic & mathematics in mind, not foreign languages. The circumflex is rarely used by itself (sometimes for exponents), usually it is used in words like "hôtel" or "fête" (pardon my French).
@@koenlefever - As indicated by the timestamp, my comment was specifically about the changes mentioned at 8:04.
And I never said anything about foreign languages (accents on their own have a completely different code from accented letters, so confusing them wouldn't have been an issue even with ASCII codepages - although it could be relevant for text entry, since a keyboard would be unlikely to dedicate separate keys to two nearly identical symbols).
3:27 That was actually RUBOUT, meaning “ignore this character”.
Of course, not to be confused with the expression "rub one out"
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.
There was a similar issue with the digit 0 and letter O on the old ASR-33 teletype. There were two standards in use, "Army" standard, where the digit 0 had a slash like Ø, and the "FORTRAN" standard, where the letter O got the slash (this is, of course, US-centric, cheerfully ignoring languages where Ø is a letter of its own). You could get an ASR-33 in either standard, but as time went on, and parts got interchanged, you'd occasionally find one with the keyboard marked one way, but the print element the other, so the O key would print Ø, or the Ø key would print 0. These were also the days where, depending on the print element you got, the circumflex could be its ^ meaning, or replaced with the ¬ symbol, or even a left arrow ← for some reason. It's been a while, but I think the 0x7C character was rendered as the reverse solidus \.
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 '°'
The swiss German QWERTZ uses the top left key for "§" and "°", the full pipe is Alt-Gr + 1 and the broken one is Alt-Gr + 7
Normally I like to think I can keep up with these videos pretty well but this one made my head spin.
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.
We all know the value of the pipe symbol in making forward arrows on minecraft signs.
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.
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
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!
KEYBOARD!!!
# 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
17:55 "So as a recap..."
Clever man.
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.
Standards and Progress are mutually incompatible, if you think about it...
GNU/Linux user here. It's still needed.
yes, "if [ $something ] || [ $notsomething ].."
@@tachalorah more like "ls -A | grep -i dwarffortress"
The solid bar, the broken bar seems to be interpreted as a name.
@@Supertimegamingify haha, i forgot that "| grep" :)
It's also still needed by anyone who uses any programming language with an "OR" logic operator, as "OR" has generally been represented by two pipes. Or in other words, anything that isn't bootable ASM.
"...explained something you never cared about"? Nah, explained something I didn't know I cared about until now.
Nicely said
Well, at least Brits don't type on the wrong side of the keyboard
1:25 Telegraph codes aren't really binary though. They use at least three symbols: short pulses, long pulses, and the pause between letters
"dot (pause) dash dot" and
"dot dash (pause) dot" mean different things
Without the pauses, a sequence of dots and dashes would be indecipherable
And on Swiss keyboards ¦ is called with AltGr + 1 and | is calles with AltGr + 7. It is correctly labeled and prints correctly, yet the pipe is the solid | symbol, where as the ¦ symbol seemingly has no use at all.
Holy crap. I've been staring at keyboards with 'Alt Gr' or some other distinction between the alt keys for most of my life, and I have never once realised why.
I just tested it on the keyboard I'm currently using (which, coincidentally is a UK keyboard, though I no longer live there).
The only labelled '3rd' character is the key in the top left. (actually not true the euro symbol € also shows up explicitly)
`¬¦
Sure enough, it does what is mentioned in the video.
However, out of curiosity, I tried some other keys.
Here's the ones that gave results;
4$€
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
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)
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.
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.
16:42 what keyboard is that with the parallelogram keys? Its amazing!
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. ;)
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)
"share not Cher" LOL I always appreciate some dry humor among facts =)
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!
Here's a fun semi-related note from the GNU Smalltalk manual:
It also bears mentioning that there are two assignment operators: _ and :=. Both are usable interchangeably, provided that they are surrounded by spaces. The GNU Smalltalk kernel code uses the := form exclusively, but _ is supported a) for compatibility with previous versions of GNU Smalltalk b) because this is the correct mapping between the assignment operator mentioned in the Blue Book and the current ASCII definition. In the ancient days (like the middle 70’s), the ASCII underscore character was also printed as a back-arrow, and many terminals would display it that way, thus its current usage. Anyway, using _ may lead to portability problems.
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.
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
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
I just love that MS-DOS was your example for the function of the pipe character.
Thanks again for clarifying how IBM kept disrupting keyboards,. ASCII, and etc since 1977.
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
OMG - I learned something at 6:30 that I never knew in 44 years of being in computers 😮
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.
3:05 "punched card was used for entering data..." Video shows paper tape, and even the example of a character shows level 7 punched tape.
6:42 "why hash is called the pound symbol." No, it's because in some business contexts the hash is used as an abbreviation for pounds (avoirdupois, I presume).
I notice you didn't mention BCD or EBCDIC, IBM's standard character sets which were standard for all manufacturers who used IBM punchcards until at least 1969 or thereabouts. They were standard on the IBM 027 and 029 card punches respectively. They were incorporated by the newer ASCII machines by weird electronic hardware code translators, causing no end of confusion.
But there is always something new to learn. Thanks for those.
I respect any content creator that can make such a dry subject so entertaining. I loved how you read the nastygram from the programmers' group. 😂
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!
No one calls it a pound symbol.
"Or youtubers can use it to separate sections in their video titles" ... guilty! lol
"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.
That sound at the start of the video. Brought back childhood memories.
Thank you
Another GREAT documentary about computer hardware history. I recommend watching this video. Thank You!
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
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 UA-cam 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
What's the bizarre keyboard at 16:41?
seems like kensington 64331 comfort type
Looks like some kind of "ergonomic" keyboard.
You can use a broken bar in Windows file names instead of a colon (:) , which is not allowed there. Or instead of the (unbroken) vertical bar (|), which is also not allowed.
"It was the telegraph…" let me stop you there. Telegraph transmission codes such as XON/XOFF, EOT, &c. originate with ship-to-ship and battlefield flag semaphores. Even their location/order in the ASCII table relates to this origin, plus a "flag bit" making them "control codes". (See what I did there? 😉) While semaphore has no "message continues" dedicated signal, morse does, as a signalling extension. But, similarly, in Morse, there is no exclamation mark, dollar sign, or at mark without extensions, either. Appreciate the "obviously inserted" VO clip mentioning UNIX. 😀
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.
Well, he was only saying that | keys with the | key drawn wrong shouldn't exist, not that there shouldn't be a key for that character.
The world: we need a standard code set
CBM: Hold my beer
Nostalgia Nerd: "If you've used MS-Dos in the past, you're probably familiar with this character."
Linux: "Excuse me, actually..."
One of my first jobs included having to translate from EBCDIC to (DOS) ASCII in data dumps we got from hospital mainframes, and needed to process on PCs. That was in the early 90s.
FWIW, the pipe was used for bitwise | and logical || OR in C (so back to the start of Unix). Also, interestingly, my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard uses the solid line rather than the broken one. Windows Terminal (with the default font) also shows it as a solid line. No logical not symbol, though.
I love how his advertisement for SquareSpace is literally a screen capture of him not being able to use it and eventually giving up.
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?
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.
On my keyboard, the key beside z generate:
alone: **
altgr: *|*
altgr + shift: *¦*
That's weird, on mine it's x
Cool, my keyboard has this key and doesn't have it at the same time. The shift key only has Z to the right of it, but there is the carbon trace under the hole for the shift key stabilizer. I had to snap off one of the stabilizer pegs because it kept registering the key with shift and inserted |. It cost me like $10 or less (20pln, I dunno how many dollars), but it is SOOO cheap inside. There is even a AA battery slot inside, but without any contacts, just a pointless slot, on the back is an outline for a flap, right under the slot.
@@redakaminekloc5167 It's good to put batteries in pointless slots, when you're the driver of a train.
That's weird, on mine it's SHIFT
If you're too lazy to use AltGr, you can also use ctrl+alt but on any side of your keyboard
Our company actually uses the pipe pretty frequently. We deal with lots of trading partners that send us files, instead of having them send us CSV which can cause issues if the destination program doesn't specify the "text qualifier" (or if they forget to set a text qualifier as well). It's just easier to use pipes since a pipe more than likely wont be contained in the data file itself, unlike a comma in a true CSV file. So our company actually uses the pipe very frequently.
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.
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 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
Sadly , Now YT will bombard me with 36 videos a day about fonts and keyboards
Good
I am not old enough for this knowledge, but really enjoyed this history lesson! After a bad day, something to smile about.
Great explanation of something I had never even noticed! Thanks
Linux sysadmins use almost every "nostalgic" symbol to keep your UA-cam, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google.... your Internet alive.
Never ceases to amaze me how much critical infrastructure is, in fact, just a series of |
"Nothing can represent not, or negate."
But "!" is right there?
EDIT: I should have waited 12 seconds. lmfao, this blows my mind.
Unix: less
Microsoft: more
Unix: no, less
Microsoft: MOOOORRREEEEE
Linux: yeah whatever
'less' is the GNU version of 'more'. Intentional joke, just like the name 'GNU'
@@monty9373 actually, less was originally written for Unix, just like more. The name is a joke about the fact that less allows scrolling backwards, so it's "reversed more".
@@ishashka Ah! The oldest version I've ever run across is part of the GNU utils, so I jumped to conclusions. Should've checked Wikipedia!
Yeah. I've owned keyboards that have that symbol for the Line key as well.
I always thought it was just the paint coming off.
Awesome video! I am using Linux, so I have the solid bar. When I was younger, I used MS-DOS, and had the broken bar. Always wondered why there was a difference! THANK YOU!
The “alt graph”?
What the heck kind of key is that?
Me, I just liked seeing all the Dwarf Fortress graphics in this episode.
i didn't see any tilesets :)
AlrGr is just Ctrl-Alt in one key. It is used so that one can have up to 4 characters in a key.
The real WTF is: why is Nostalgia Nerd representing characters in 16 bits at 15:30 while talking about 8-or-fewer-bit characer sets. Just so he could say "double-O-seven"?
In fact, there are no common character sets in use today that fit in 16 bits. The obsolete 16-bit UCS-2 has been replaced by UTF-16, whose characters may be up to 21 bits long!
$ CAT NERD | GREP NOSTALGIA
-bash: GREP: command not found
-bash: CAT: command not found
figlet NOSTALGIA | lolcat
15:57: Code page 850 did *not* introduce ISO-8859-1, ECMA 94 (Latin alphabet 1) to DOS. Codepage 850 just introduced the characters from ISO-8859-1 into DOS; but with different character numbers, such that all characters common between Codepage 850 and Codepage 437 are at the same code point. Because the new characters in 850 are assigned to holes created by removing less-used characters from 437, the assignment of code points in 850 looks even more like the assigners were high than in the original "high ascii".
Still you are right that Codepage 850 introduced the distinction between a broken and a non-broken bar to DOS, because it introduced all characters from Latin-1.
Uk user here, heres the layout on my keyboard
¦