Re: The "Pound Sign" vs. the "Number Sign"

On Tue, 12 May 2009 23:29:58 +0100, the Omrud
<usenet.omrud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mike Barnes wrote:
In alt.usage.english, Peter Duncanson (BrE) wrote:
On Tue, 12 May 2009 07:24:16 +0100, Mike Barnes
<mikebarnes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In alt.usage.english, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
Your implication is almost exactly backwards. Seven-bit character set
designers equated "£" and "#" almost certainly *because* "#" was read
as "pound". That meant that when people in the UK sent mail that said
"£5", it would show up on our US terminals as "#5", which, though not
the way we used the pound sign, was at least transparent enough that
we could learn to read it.
Hmmm. My instinct says that the £/# mapping predated international e-
mail (certainly common use thereof) by many years. Anyone know for sure?

My guess would be that a position was needed a position for £; the $
position was quite rightly rejected; and the # position was irresistible
because of the name coincidence.
That might be the case, but at the time I knew of the # only as the
"hash" mark/sign/symbol which was used by Americans to mean "number". It
was much later, possibly through AUE or AEU that Americans called it the
"pound" sign.

My assumption at the time was that the # position in the character code
was used for the UK currency symbol because # was not used in the UK and
was therefore redundant.

If you're talking about characters not used by the general UK public,
there were other candidates such as caret and tilde.

It was only when American designed programming languages using # escaped
from their homeland that problems arose.

The very un-American computers designed and manufactured in the UK by
ICL used # for program names (for example, #XQMY), in the early 1970s to
my certain knowledge, and probably a lot earlier. They weren't ASCII
though; ICL used their own 6-bit character set.

1967 to my certain knowledge - that's when Dad started as a programmer
(he only lasted 2 years and eventually gave up and went back to
estimating, a trade which has since disappeared because of the computer)
and when he introduced me to my first mainframe, a 1901.

1964-ish. The # prefix for program names was used on the ICT 1900
Series. The 1900s were a development of the FP6000 from Canada. It is
possible that the program naming convention and some other conventions
were imported with the computer.

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT_1900

The basic character set was based around a 6-bit byte, which meant
that only 64 different characters could be represented: upper case
letters, the numbers 0 to 9 and a handful of other symbols.
....

The ICL ASCII codes for the symbols $ (dollar) £ (pound) and #
(hash) were different from the other major suppliers of computer
equipment.

That brings back memories!

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
.

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