On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 09:43:33AM -0400, Dan Sommers wrote: > I had a customer who was old enough to > use upper case letter O for zero and lower case letter l for 1 because > she was old enough to have learned to type before typewriters had number > keys; that made a real mess of sorting street addresses.
How old was your customer? The Hansen Writing Ball, first commercially sold in 1870, had digit keys: https://historythings.com/life-changing-invention-typewriters/ The first recognisable typewriter, the Sholdes and Glidden Type-writer (note the hyphen!), was sold in 1864. Here's a photo of one: https://historythings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/9999006136-l.jpg The photo isn't clear enough to see the keys, but there are 44 of them. Since the Sholdes typewriter didn't have lowercase letters, it's hard to imagine what the remaining keys after the uppercase letters and punctuation marks were if they weren't digits. (44 keys would nicely match 26 letters, 10 digits, space and seven punctuation marks.) And this 1903 Olympia typewriter clearly has digits: https://historythings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/SAM_2381_clipped_rev_1.png It is certainly true that many people of a certain age used to interchange 0 and O, and 1 and l, but I don't think it had anything to do with learning to type on typewriters without digits. What did they use when they needed the digits 2 through 9? -- Steven _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/T3D76PIO7VE2FSKEXYHORWGWFDY544MR/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
