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.

The pipe is literally used in the title of this video

Two character sets walk into a bar. "Whoa there, break it up!" yells the bartender.

Wait, so if the "| ¬" were substituted with "! ^" because of the glyphs similarity, why was "!" used as the not symbol and "^" for the exclusive or ?

On danish keyboard there are 3 vertical bar symbols: - one above Tab - one next to left Shift - one next to Backspace

Someone once said to me "standards are great, there are so many that everybody can have one of their own".

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.)

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

"If you've ever used MS DOS" *shows a pipe and the `more` command, both originating from Unix*

Fast forward a few decades and now the exclamation mark is also used for "logical NOT"

Linux still uses the pipe.

The ! being used as the logical or hurts my modern programmer brain.

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.

Fascinating, I always like weirdish documentaries explaining things I wouldn't be bothered to google about. T'was interesting my good man.

To pipe, or to partial pipe? That is the question we ASCII. Sorry, I really couldn't help myself. Neat video!

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 was familiar with using pipe due to being a Linux user, but I had no idea about its history.

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.

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).

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 °.

17:55 "So as a recap..." Clever man.

Or, as the French would say: *Ceci* *n'est* *pas* *une* *pipe*

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!

Me, presented with a foreign keyboard "Now where could my pipe be?"

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.

Interesting video, but I think I'm in the "more confused" category now. 🤔

That is not where the name “pound sign” of # comes. # was used for lbs. as early as the 1830s in the United States.

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.

3:27 That was actually RUBOUT, meaning “ignore this character”.

We all know the value of the pipe symbol in making forward arrows on minecraft signs.

Normally I like to think I can keep up with these videos pretty well but this one made my head spin.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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!

a) they do not exist, at least on my keyboard b) they should exist at least for latex typing, I would need them

"...explained something you never cared about"? Nah, explained something I didn't know I cared about until now.

This episode was actually super informative, thanks for going into such depth! ❤️

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

# 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.

You could have avoided making this entire video essay if you'd just invoked `more readme.txt`.

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".

4:23 The logical OR symbol is ∨ (line 8 in the first column). The | is the Sheffer stroke, representing the NAND operator.

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!

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.

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

GNU/Linux user here. It's still needed.

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.

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!

I always thought the broken vertical bar was made to distinguish it from a lowercase “l”

"share not Cher" LOL I always appreciate some dry humor among facts =)

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

Excellent information Sir!

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?

0:00 [CC] "[Resplendent intro sounds]" Indeed they are.

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.

Oh my. So much to say! First, I was born in 1963 and my Dad was a pro photographer. As an infant I had the build of a wrestler and his colleagues used to call me "the Little Bull." Arouind 1966, he took some humorous photos of infant me, costumed in the style of the stereotypical early-1900s "circus Strong Man": dressed in a one-shouldered leopard skin and standing next to a big black weight. The role of that "big black weight "was played by an upside-down plastic trashcan, labeled "500 #,." As a child, that label mystified me, because I had only ever heard the "#" character (such as on my Mom's typewriter, which I had taught myself to use properly by age 9 / 1972) called the "number sign.," as in "We're #1!" and so on. It was probably not until the early 1980s, when I went away to school, that I first heard someone refer to that character as the "pound sign," which finally clarified the labeling on that trashcan-cum-weight in that early-childhood photo shoot. I never heard it referred to as anything else until Twitter started using it, whereupon "hash" came into common usage. But my point is that "#" was apparently in use, among people who had absolutely no connection with numeric character encodings or standards (i.e. my Dad and the expected audience for his photos), long before I reached even "the age of reason" or even nursery school. I believe if you seek out old shipping records from the previous century you might find "#" used to mean "pounds," quite commonly. Second, there are several other holdovers from the days of fifty or more years ago. Consider ASCII 13 and 10 (decimal), respectively kjnown as "Carriage Return" and "Line Feed." These refer to the physical operations of returning a physical, paper-holding "carriage" horizontally to the beginning of a line, and advancing the paper from one line to the next, respectively. In the physical typewriter and printer these operations were separate, and performing a Carriage Return without performing a Line Feed allowed printed characters to overstrike others printed previously on the same line, literally rendering both characters at the same position at the same time (for example, overlaying "o" and "+" to form a kind of "targeting reticle" symbol). In the early days, when output was primarily on paper, and even input was entered either with no display at all (cards, tape) or at a teletype terminal using paper, computers and printers continued to observe the separate nature, and the separability, of the "Carriage Return" and "Line Feed" operations. FORTRAN output statements historically reserved one column of each line of data for a character that specified whether, and by how much, the paper is to be Line Fed after printing the line. FORTRAN thereby naturally supports overstriking. The programming language APL relies heavily on overstrike capability to render many of its operator symbols, which can consist of multiple characters (some of then not even in the standard ASCII set, such as the Greek alphabet) ; on paper teletype terminals, these were typed by striking the key for the first part of the symbol, then the Backspace key (which moves the print position to the left, but on paper could not erase the character already there), then the key for the second part of the symbol. Unfortunately, during the era between paper terminals and today's bit-level-addressable displays and subpixel-addressable printers, there was interposed an era of video-display terminals which, for the most part, physically could not display more than one character at a particular position -- and the C programming language, in which a "newline" character is a single symbol which, when printed, performs BOTH "Carriage Return" AND "Line Feed" as an inseparable, atomic, operation. So a lot of the knowledge of the separability of Carriage Return and Line Feed was lost, because the desirable effects of performing Carriage Return WITHOUT Line Feed could no longer be performed: the second line of data printed to the terminal would simply REPLACE what was there before -- not OVERLAY it as on paper. This legacy shows up in Windows today. First, "text" files use the two-character sequence ASCII 13, ASCII 10 -- CR, LF -- that is, Carriage Return Line Feed, as an inseparable, atomic, "line separator," and programs that read text files will not display them properly if either of the two characters is omitted. (Notably, however, such programs DON'T misbehave in the expected sense of actually PERFORMING only the effect of the single character that actually appears, i.e. a Carriage Return without a Line Feed, or vice versa; instead, the programs suddenly treat the single character CR or LF as some kind of mystery, and display a glyph that means "unrecognized character.") Furthermore, while programs such as MS Word allow the user to switch between "Insert" and "Overstrike" typing modes, that which the software calls "Overstrike" mode ISN'T REALLY: it should be called "Replace" mode, a la the terminals that couldn't display multiple characters overstruck. A real "Overstrike" mode would be perfectly possible -- today's displays, and printers, will both happily do so if software is written to request/support such placement of characters on the screen or paper -- so this is simply the propagation of forgetfulness of what "Overstrike" is really supposed to mean. It remains to be seen whether this is deliberate or the result of unbroken ignorance since the decline of paper terminals. (Unix/Linux, by contrast, get Carriage Control / Line Feed entirely wrong: they use ONLY a Line Feed character to separate "lines of text" -- the performance of a Carriage Return is entirely implicit, which betrays complete ignorance of the sheer possibility of ever performing one without the other.) Third, does ANY computer system REALLY use ASCII exactly "as defined?" Certainly the three major brands of machine which emerged in the first generation of off-the-shelf personal computers, before the first IBM PCs, did things differently. I had an Atari 800, on which Atari used its own, idiosyncratic, "ATASCII" character set, which was mostly identical to ASCII but assigned graphical glyphs to all the "control" characters (values 0-31 decimal), designated the high bit as representing "inverse video," and -- strangest of all -- defined its own, single, End-Of-Line (EOL) character, using the value 155 decimal. It was thus made largely impossible to straightforwardly print even plain text from an Atari computer to a generic printer; Atari's solution was to manufacture and sell an Interface Module that performed some of the necessary translations (EOL to CR, or to CR-LF, or ...), but that translation, itself, interfered with efforts to print graphics, because when printing graphics you DIDN'T want a single character of value 155 translated into two separate characters valued 13 and 10... It might/should have been possible to program an interface that recognized various printer brands' "graphics data follows" commands in the data stream, and suppressed the translation during "known graphics" output -- but I don't believe anyone ever did that. Heck, I didn't even think of it MYSELF until JUST NOW, more than forty years later. I have never heard anything odd about the Apple II or Commodore 64, the Atari's primary competitors in the early days -- but I DID hear something odd about the Macintosh perhaps using the "Control O" character -- ASCII 15 decimal -- as either its Carriage Return or Line Feed character. Though it's possible I may have misheard, or misunderstood. Together with this video's report of the quirky custom redesign of the ASCII character table under DOS, it sounds as though ASCII has always been treated as more of a "useful suggestion" than what you'd like a STANDARD to be.

"Or youtubers can use it to separate sections in their video titles" ... guilty! lol

I just looked at my keyboard's pipe key only to discover it's an unbroken bar!

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.

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!

Linux sysadmins use almost every "nostalgic" symbol to keep your KZfaq, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google.... your Internet alive.

Meanwhile on the German Keyboard: When coding, you regularly break your hand as you need AltGr and 7 to type {

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!

I love how his advertisement for SquareSpace is literally a screen capture of him not being able to use it and eventually giving up.

The world: we need a standard code set CBM: Hold my beer

The first broken vertical bar is also known as James Bond Compromised.

Thanks I really appreciated this video and actually learned something very useful that I was curious about. 👍

I personally prefer to use the Multiply Dot ( · ) as a separation mark. Except for programming and commands, I rarely use the solid Bar ( | ) for this purpose, because it looks too similar to the Uppercase Letter I ( I ), and the Lowercase Letter L ( l ). Until this video, I didn't knew that the Broken Bar is an entirely different character. I just thought that some fonts display the bar Whole and some fonts display it Cut-in-halves. By the way, why do I and l look so similar? I always thought I l should read I ɭ .

What's the bizarre keyboard at 16:41?

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

On scandinavian keyboards they often combine the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian layouts on a single keyboard (to save costs I assume). Thus I have three pipe symbols on mine, one for each language layout, they of course all had to chose a different position for it.

Thanks again for clarifying how IBM kept disrupting keyboards,. ASCII, and etc since 1977.

I swear you just made a new key appear on my keyboard

"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.

Another GREAT documentary about computer hardware history. I recommend watching this video. Thank You!

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.

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.

Nostalgia Nerd: "|" keys shouldn't exist Also Nostalgia Nerd: uses "|" in title

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).

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.

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.

Imagine using an escape character ( \ ) for directory paths *laughs with every OS that isn't Windows*

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 ;)

That sound at the start of the video. Brought back childhood memories. Thank you

Sadly , Now YT will bombard me with 36 videos a day about fonts and keyboards

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?

On the subject of non-standard standards, let's not forget EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) from IBM. Used on big-iron mainframes, it was also used in their DisplayWriter standalone word processor unit, as well as in the PC software word processor DisplayWrite. I still recall using a Norton Utilities for DOS program to "print" a DisplayWrite document containing EBCDIC into an ASCII one because that was the only way to recover the text inside. The user was willing to reformat the text but had no other copy of it to retype.

Love your content | you make useless obscure information so entertaining!! just discovered your channel

Take a shot every time he says "bar". It's about bar, after all.

On my keyboard, the key beside z generate: alone: ** altgr: *|* altgr + shift: *¦*

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.

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.