On Friday, May 22, 2020, at 8:28, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > 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.
> https://historythings.com/life-changing-invention-typewriters/ I can see 0, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 clearly. I can't see a 1, although it appears that the key between the 0 and the Q is missing its label. > 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. The photo is not clear, but I can convince myself that the keys on the top row start at 2 and run through 9 and 0. Still no 1. > And this 1903 Olympia typewriter clearly has digits: > > https://historythings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/SAM_2381_clipped_rev_1.png Still no 1. > 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? Okay, "before typewriters had number keys" is obviously wrong. Those pictures support "before typewriters had 1 keys." -- “Atoms are not things.” – Werner Heisenberg Dan Sommers, http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan _______________________________________________ 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/A3VY7HYW6XOJT4XOGHETRMOZALGSXSC2/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
