Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 11:25 AM Shoppa, Tim via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > This website has a history of slashing the letter O (and also ticked, > center-dotted, etc.) oriented around computing: > https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/characters/slashed-o/index.html Now I understand... For me, who started coding in the late 70s, it was always the number 0 that was slashed, dotted, or otherwise made to look 'odd', never the letter o. Warner
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 4/26/22 10:48, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote: > On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 11:25 AM Shoppa, Tim via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > >> This website has a history of slashing the letter O (and also ticked, >> center-dotted, etc.) oriented around computing: >> https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/characters/slashed-o/index.html > > > Now I understand... > > For me, who started coding in the late 70s, it was always the number 0 that > was slashed, dotted, or otherwise made to look 'odd', never the letter o. I recall getting a job back from keypunch with a note attached: "I wasn't sure if you meant zero or oh (I always slashed my zeroes; the keypunch form specifically called that out), so I did some of both". Card deck into trash; go find a keypunch and do the stuff myself. Management had this diktat that programmers were permitted to punch only a few cards at a time; the time to punch a full deck cost the company too much and so should be sent to keypunch. Obviously, management never had to work with the output of the keypunch pool... --Chuck
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, 26 Apr 2022, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: I recall getting a job back from keypunch with a note attached: "I wasn't sure if you meant zero or oh (I always slashed my zeroes; the keypunch form specifically called that out), so I did some of both". Card deck into trash; go find a keypunch and do the stuff myself. Management had this diktat that programmers were permitted to punch only a few cards at a time; the time to punch a full deck cost the company too much and so should be sent to keypunch. Obviously, management never had to work with the output of the keypunch pool... "You can make a few corrections, but no punching whole jobs." One of my cow-orkers, a programmer, insisted that it was much faster for him to type as he composed, even on a 026, than it was to write on coding sheets, and then hand it off. Management responded, "POLICY." He held up a single blank card, and asked, "Is it OK for me to type the corrections, of a few dozen cards to be inserted in this deck?" Management responded, "ANYBODY WHO KEYPUNCHES WILL BE PAID KEYPUNCHER PAY!" So, he handed me the card, and said, "Here, you could use a raise." (I was a "Data Technician", which was a euphemism for Go-fer entry level job) It was a truly trivial FORTRAN task that was well within my capabilities at the time. (Prior to that job, I had been doing temp work around town keypunching.) While they were still giving him a hard time, I went to the next room, punched a dozen cards and brought them back. "Would it be OK if we just did a printout of the deck and handed in THAT, instead of coding sheets?" We did have one old-timer who slashed letter O. We talked to the keypunchers, and solved it by a discussion, and having him put his name in red LARGE on every sheet. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:44 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > We did have one old-timer who slashed letter O. We talked to the > keypunchers, and solved it by a discussion, and having him put his name in > red LARGE on every sheet. Forgive me, but is this not why we had a place on the coding forms explicitly for this purpose, as seen in: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/FortranCodingForm.png where "Punching Instructions" consisted of example pairs of a writer's hand lettered graphic and how it should actually be punched? I would have thought this was a fully solved problem from really early on. G.
RE: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
At the University Of Maryland, in the Computer Science building (in the basement) there were about a dozen punches. A few (two I think?) were labeled "EXPRESS PUNCH 10 CARDS OR LESS". One evening, there was a line of 15 people waiting for a regular punch and a line of about 5 people waiting for the express punches. After noting who was at the end of the regular punch line, I got in the express line. I punched ten cards and went to the back of the line (it stayed between 5 and 10 people long). I think I punched about eighty cards. I expected to get yelled at (or dirty looks at least) but nobody seemed to notice. I finished before the guy who was at the end of the regular punch line when I entered got to a punch. -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 4/26/22 12:44, Fred Cisin wrote: > One of my cow-orkers, a programmer, insisted that it was much faster for > him to type as he composed, even on a 026, than it was to write on > coding sheets, and then hand it off. There is something to that. Many was the time that I'd be punching late at night (just go to the keypunch pool area and pull up an 029), where I'd stop and say "nope--that's not going to work" and then revise my code on the fly. Management got so evangelical about the "programmers don't keypunch" that they moved the single keypunch (that serviced several systems) outside of the machine room into the hallway and put it on a 10 minute timer. So those of us with block time on the machines just brought up o26 and typed our stuff in on the DD60 and punched it on the 415. Later, we'd have to take the deck and interpret it, but it was good enough for on-the-spot work. Nighttime at CDC was a great time for bootlegging. The guards knew better than to fool with programmers. Occasionally, we'd get a CE who took umbrage at those guys (not me) who smoked, and drank coffee at the console. Whole operating systems got written at night, I suspect. --Chuck
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 2022-04-26 2:01 p.m., Gavin Scott via cctalk wrote: On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:44 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: We did have one old-timer who slashed letter O. We talked to the keypunchers, and solved it by a discussion, and having him put his name in red LARGE on every sheet. Forgive me, but is this not why we had a place on the coding forms explicitly for this purpose, as seen in: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/FortranCodingForm.png where "Punching Instructions" consisted of example pairs of a writer's hand lettered graphic and how it should actually be punched? I would have thought this was a fully solved problem from really early on. G. In Many cases the monkeys can't read. :) Ben. PS: Did any common I/O devices have the ALGOL symbols Less than or Equals, Greater than or equals , not , arrows and other misc symbols?
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
> On Apr 26, 2022, at 4:41 PM, ben via cctalk wrote: > > ... > PS: Did any common I/O devices have the ALGOL symbols Less than or Equals, > Greater than or equals , not , arrows and other misc symbols? Yes, the Flexowriters at TU Eindhoven used to punch ALGOL programs for the Electrologica X8 machine there (late 1960s through early 1970s). As I recall, Dijkstra made some comment somewhere about the usefulness of being able to specify your own character set. Those machines had upper/lower case letters, several special character such as the logic symbols not, or, and, the subscript 10 for exponential notation numbers, plus non-escaping underline and vertical bar. The underline was used for keywords, so the ALGOL keyword "begin" was keyed as _b_e_g_i_n. It would also make several other special characters, for example _= (underlined equal) is the Boolean equivalence operator, and _ followed by the not symbol gives you the "implies" operator, and _< is less-or-equal. The vertical bar would also make several overstruck symbols, for example |= becomes not-equal, | followed by the and symbol is uparrow (for exponentiation). The local inventions |< and |> were used for string quotes. Here's a sample of what it would look like printed on the Flexowriter. The line printers were upper-case only; they'd print lower case letters as upper case, upper case letters overprinted with a period. Ugh... paul
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
Bummer, no attachments... paul > On Apr 26, 2022, at 5:14 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk > wrote: > > > >> On Apr 26, 2022, at 4:41 PM, ben via cctalk wrote: >> >> ... >> PS: Did any common I/O devices have the ALGOL symbols Less than or Equals, >> Greater than or equals , not , arrows and other misc symbols? > > Yes, the Flexowriters at TU Eindhoven used to punch ALGOL programs for the > Electrologica X8 machine there (late 1960s through early 1970s). As I > recall, Dijkstra made some comment somewhere about the usefulness of being > able to specify your own character set. > > Those machines had upper/lower case letters, several special character such > as the logic symbols not, or, and, the subscript 10 for exponential notation > numbers, plus non-escaping underline and vertical bar. The underline was > used for keywords, so the ALGOL keyword "begin" was keyed as _b_e_g_i_n. It > would also make several other special characters, for example _= (underlined > equal) is the Boolean equivalence operator, and _ followed by the not symbol > gives you the "implies" operator, and _< is less-or-equal. The vertical bar > would also make several overstruck symbols, for example |= becomes not-equal, > | followed by the and symbol is uparrow (for exponentiation). The local > inventions |< and |> were used for string quotes. > > Here's a sample of what it would look like printed on the Flexowriter. The > line printers were upper-case only; they'd print lower case letters as upper > case, upper case letters overprinted with a period. Ugh... > > paul >
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 4/26/22 13:41, ben via cctalk wrote: > PS: Did any common I/O devices have the ALGOL symbols Less than or > Equals, Greater than or equals , not , arrows and other misc symbols? > CDC Display code certainly started out that way. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_display_code. If you wanted ASCII graphics, you changed the print train on the 512 printer. If you had a 501 drum printer, you learned to translate. e.g. " = ≠ And so on... --Chuck
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, 26 Apr 2022, Chuck Guzis wrote: Whole operating systems got written at night, I suspect. I suspect that Windoze was written during business hours.
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, 26 Apr 2022, Gavin Scott wrote: Forgive me, but is this not why we had a place on the coding forms explicitly for this purpose, as seen in: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/FortranCodingForm.png where "Punching Instructions" consisted of example pairs of a writer's hand lettered graphic and how it should actually be punched? I would have thought this was a fully solved problem from really early on. WHY did there ever exist any FORTRAN coding sheets WITHOUT that? (and, YES, there were.)
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 2022-04-26 4:28 p.m., Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: On Tue, 26 Apr 2022, Chuck Guzis wrote: Whole operating systems got written at night, I suspect. I suspect that Windoze was written during business hours. if you change that to "Whole operating systems got written/DEBUGGED at night, I suspect." that would explain many things today. I also suspect, you did not have wide range of mostly compatible hardware of today, but only a few I/O devices and simple MMU's. Ben.
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
I remember about 30 years ago, a registration card for a Microsoft product had specific forms that they wanted for certain letters, for the sake of a slightly inadequate handwriting recognition program. Among those was "ticked letter O". A round 'O", with an extra mark on the upper right. Like a slashed zero, with the slash going from upper right, but stopping before the center of the character. Or like an inverted 'Q' At the time, I thought that that surely would increase confusion between zero, letter 'O' and letter 'Q'. Yes, we were getting used to Palm's "Graffiti" stylized letters. Yes, the confusion between slashing zero VS slashing letter 'O' DID resolve itself, as such things will do, as soon as everybody who slashed letter 'O' had died off. I understand that some European countries had more orless problems with it than we did, particularly those who already had "altered" characters included in their languages. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 4/26/22 19:05, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> I remember about 30 years ago, a registration card for a Microsoft
> product had specific forms that they wanted for certain letters, for the
> sake of a slightly inadequate handwriting recognition program. Among
> those was "ticked letter O". A round 'O", with an extra mark on the
> upper right. Like a slashed zero, with the slash going from upper right,
> but stopping before the center of the character. Or like an inverted 'Q'
> At the time, I thought that that surely would increase confusion between
> zero, letter 'O' and letter 'Q'.
All of that could have been avoided had we all adopted OCR-A
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A)
CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office
typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it.
Finally, I managed to snag an IBM Model D Executive when one of the
departments shuffled off to Minnesota. ("Appropriating" equipment when
departments moved or projects shut down was a favorite hobby. All such
equipment never left the facility, so I wasn't really doing anything
wrong, but confusing the bean counters). I had the best-looking office
memos bar none.
OCR-B was a bit less offensive, but the difference between capital oh
and zero was less apparent.
--Chuck
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 2022-04-26 8:48 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it. Well you can't have them use IBM equipment. Looking at some IBM DOC's from the 60's they had boxed tables for computer formats but using real box characters. +++ | xxx| xxx| +++ How did they print that? OCR-B was a bit less offensive, but the difference between capital oh and zero was less apparent. --Chuck IFWEALLSPOKEGREE KSTILLWEWOULDHAV ENOPROBLEMATALLL OWERCASEISTHEHAN DWRITINGFONT BEN
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 6:25 PM Shoppa, Tim via cctalk wrote: > I'm 99% sure I've seen a listing of various Model 33 type-cylinder choices on > some greenkeys site. Maybe it's in one of my paper Teletype manuals. Most are > at least related to ASCII but there were a handful that were really "out > there" (weather symbols, etc.) and seemed to have nothing to do with ASCII > except they skipped the first 32 characters as unprintables. Volume 3 of the Model 33 technical manual -- the parts lists -- has tables of the type cylinder characters. It starts on page 46 of the .pdf I downloard, I suspect from the Australian HP museum site. -tony
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 4/26/22 20:10, ben via cctalk wrote: > On 2022-04-26 8:48 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > >> CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office >> typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it. >> > > Well you can't have them use IBM equipment. > Looking at some IBM DOC's from the 60's > they had boxed tables for computer formats > but using real box characters. > > +++ > | xxx| xxx| > +++ > > How did they print that? Cut and paste. Consider the S/360 Assembler (F) manual: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C26-3756-2_Assembler_F_Programmers_Guide_196711.pdf Look at PDF page 10. Note the box at the bottom of the page and how it's not even perfectly horizontal at the borders. In fact, it looks to be hand-drawn. I suspect that things were put together the old way--with scissors and rubber cement. I recall that in a real professional publications operation, several typewriters with various fonts (and sizes) were used. And then there were the T-square and ink graphics people... --Chuck
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
> On Apr 27, 2022, at 1:22 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk > wrote: > > On 4/26/22 20:10, ben via cctalk wrote: >> On 2022-04-26 8:48 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: >> >>> CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office >>> typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it. >>> >> >> Well you can't have them use IBM equipment. >> Looking at some IBM DOC's from the 60's >> they had boxed tables for computer formats >> but using real box characters. >> >> +++ >> | xxx| xxx| >> +++ >> >> How did they print that? > > Cut and paste. Consider the S/360 Assembler (F) manual: > > http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C26-3756-2_Assembler_F_Programmers_Guide_196711.pdf > > Look at PDF page 10. Note the box at the bottom of the page and how > it's not even perfectly horizontal at the borders. In fact, it looks to > be hand-drawn. I suspect that things were put together the old > way--with scissors and rubber cement. Or the way newspapers did it: with sticky wax applied to the back of the strips of phototypesetter output, along with rolls of "border tape" to lay down the straight lines. Re OCR-B: the difference between zero and O in that font is small enough that contemporary OCR could not reliably tell the two apart. This is documented in detail in "Travels in Computerland" by Ben R. Schneider, a book about his project to digitize a multi-volume printed document in the early 1970s. It involved having it typed (in Hong Kong I think) using OCR-B type balls, and when they ran into the OCR issue it was worked around by modifying the type balls to give one of the two characters a cut in the left side, making it like a reversed C. OCR sure has come a long way since then. Yes, OCR-A is extremely ugly; Schneider actually considered it before dismissing it, on the grounds its letter forms are so bad that proofreaders trying to check the as-typed material would have a hard time dealing with it and quality would suffer as a result. paul
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 2022-04-27 9:14 a.m., Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: ... Re OCR-B: the difference between zero and O in that font is small enough that contemporary OCR could not reliably tell the two apart. This is documented in detail in "Travels in Computerland" by Ben R. Schneider, a book about his project to digitize a multi-volume printed document in the early 1970s. It involved having it typed (in Hong Kong I think) using OCR-B type balls, and when they ran into the OCR issue it was worked around by modifying the type balls to give one of the two characters a cut in the left side, making it like a reversed C. OCR sure has come a long way since then. Since OCR-B has been mentioned people might be interested in this paper on its development: http://www.telegraphics.com.au/doc/scarrott.html --Toby Yes, OCR-A is extremely ugly; Schneider actually considered it before dismissing it, on the grounds its letter forms are so bad that proofreaders trying to check the as-typed material would have a hard time dealing with it and quality would suffer as a result. paul
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
> > Cut and paste. Consider the S/360 Assembler (F) manual: > > http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C26-3756-2_Assembler_F_Programmers_Guide_196711.pdf > > Look at PDF page 10. Note the box at the bottom of the page and how > it's not even perfectly horizontal at the borders. In fact, it looks to > be hand-drawn. I suspect that things were put together the old > way--with scissors and rubber cement. I was reading this one. Can't tell if hand drawn or not. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C28-6595-1_Assembler_E_Programmers_Guide_1966.pdf Ben.
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 07:48:36PM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> On 4/26/22 19:05, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> > I remember about 30 years ago, a registration card for a Microsoft
> > product had specific forms that they wanted for certain letters, for the
> > sake of a slightly inadequate handwriting recognition program. Among
> > those was "ticked letter O". A round 'O", with an extra mark on the
> > upper right. Like a slashed zero, with the slash going from upper right,
> > but stopping before the center of the character. Or like an inverted 'Q'
> > At the time, I thought that that surely would increase confusion between
> > zero, letter 'O' and letter 'Q'.
>
> All of that could have been avoided had we all adopted OCR-A
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A)
About 40 years ago I was with a group doing OCR. I still laugh at the
pretentious
name of the paper the Engineer had written. (Dendritic analysis) I kept
thinking of teeth. (Pair of PDP-11/23 + single line 1024 bit CCD reader for the
curious.)
OCR-B is a little kinder on the eyes you must admit. Courier font resulted
in so much bad OCR...
>
> CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office
> typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it.
>
Yes it is a horrible font!
> Finally, I managed to snag an IBM Model D Executive when one of the
> departments shuffled off to Minnesota. ("Appropriating" equipment when
> departments moved or projects shut down was a favorite hobby. All such
> equipment never left the facility, so I wasn't really doing anything
> wrong, but confusing the bean counters). I had the best-looking office
> memos bar none.
>
> OCR-B was a bit less offensive, but the difference between capital oh
> and zero was less apparent.
Yes. Now try Courier ;)
>
> --Chuck
>
-- Diane
--
d...@freebsd.org d...@db.net http://www.db.net/~db
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 2022-04-27 2:54 p.m., ben via cctalk wrote: > > Cut and paste. Consider the S/360 Assembler (F) manual: > > http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C26-3756-2_Assembler_F_Programmers_Guide_196711.pdf > > Look at PDF page 10. Note the box at the bottom of the page and how > it's not even perfectly horizontal at the borders. In fact, it looks to > be hand-drawn. I suspect that things were put together the old > way--with scissors and rubber cement. I was reading this one. Can't tell if hand drawn or not. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/asm/C28-6595-1_Assembler_E_Programmers_Guide_1966.pdf All the diagrams apart from the ASCII art are hand-drawn (e.g. pages 14, 19) - i.e. technical pens, rulers, T-squares, drawing board. With some paste-up for the Futura typesetting. And probably reduced from a larger drawing, by process camera to bromide at the correct size for these pages, and then pasted down as a 'mechanical' (as described by Paul). As it happens I've recently been scanning some documents from this S/360 documentation series... --T Ben.
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 4/27/22 12:38, Diane Bruce wrote: > Yes. Now try Courier ;) That Model D had magnificent typefaces; it was proportionally-spaced. The space bar was split in the center--one side gave you an "em" space (wide); the other gave you an "n" space (narrow). When backspacing to correct, it was a bit of a mental trick to remember how wide each character was. Mine had the Arcadia typeface. http://writingball.blogspot.com/2020/05/guest-post-ibm-model-d-executive.html It goes almost without mentioning that one used a film ribbon with these. --Chuck
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
> On Apr 26, 2022, at 1:25 PM, Shoppa, Tim via cctalk > wrote: > > Paul writes: >> As for the slashed letter O, that's strange. Certainly it is not CDC >> practice; the only place I ever ran into this is with IBM, I always >> considered it an example of IBM doing >> things the weird way. So it sounds like whoever bought those Teletype >> machines had them configured in that non-standard way for some reason. >> Normal, as far as I know, was slashed digit zero. > > Slashed letter O, unslashed zero was by far the most common configuration for > Model 33 Teletypes sold/leased through Telex / Dataphone providers. My > surplus TTY experience from the early 1980's heavily turned up Model 33's > with slashed letter O's. > > If you bought a Model 33 through DEC, it almost certainly would've come with > a slashed zero and unslashed letter O. Indeed. But my first exposure to computers was in Holland, where the Flexowriters certainly didn't come with slashed letter O. Nor the Selectric console on the Philips PR8000, or the line printer output. I never ran into a slashed O until I was amazed to see one on some IBM system. Curious that it would be "the most common configuration" on model 33s. > I'm 99% sure I've seen a listing of various Model 33 type-cylinder choices on > some greenkeys site. Maybe it's in one of my paper Teletype manuals. Most are > at least related to ASCII but there were a handful that were really "out > there" (weather symbols, etc.) and seemed to have nothing to do with ASCII > except they skipped the first 32 characters as unprintables. If it has weather symbols, it might be a 6-bit machine. Up to the 1970s or so, "wire service" links connecting to newspapers to carry AP news and stock market info and the like were normally 6 bit, typesetting machine coding or something rather similar. But the actual code depended on the service: upper/lower case text for news wire, lots of fractions for stock listings, and clouds and lightning bolts and such stuff for the weather wire. > This website has a history of slashing the letter O (and also ticked, > center-dotted, etc.) oriented around computing: > https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/characters/slashed-o/index.html Wow, there is a lot of wonderful stuff on that site! It almost feels like a web page version of Lindsay Publishing, sadly gone now. paul
Re: Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
On 2022-04-28 6:03 p.m., Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: It almost feels like a web page version of Lindsay Publishing, sadly gone now. paul Here is link for RETRO mechanical things off YouTube, to fill that need to build. Machining The Antikythera Mechanism Antikythera Fragments https://www.youtube.com/c/Clickspring/featured Ben.
