Subject: Re: english name of the pound symbol on the telephone

From: "Mike Brudenell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 15:26:13 +0000

--On Fri, Dec 12, 1997 8:48 am -0500 "Michael Holzberg"
<[email-masked]> wrote: 

> Can you tell me what the official name is of the pound symbol on the
> telephone?  I think its prefix is octa....

Sigh.  I wish people would stop confusing these two quite distinct
characters.

I am pretty certain the difficulty originates (probably!) with the Americans
when the invented the basic ASCII character set (character codes 0..127). 
Whilst they carefully included their own dollar sign no provision was made
for currency symbols of other countries.

Consequently most printer manufacturers built different character sets into
their printers that would usurp one or more of the basic character set and
replace them with country-specific alternatives.  This was originally under
the control of DIP switches, and later could be switched under software.

In particular the character which looks something like this:

        |  |
      --+--+--
        |  |            <-- The "number sign", usually called "hash" here
      --+--+--              in England or, for those of a musical turn,
"sharp".
        |  |

usually could be switched to instead be printed as something which looks
(vaguely) like this (bigger only because it is more difficult to draw with
ASCII graphics:

        ,---.
       |    /
     --+----
       |
     --+--              <-- The "pound sign", representing the currency used
     --+--                  here in England (Scotland, Wales, etc)
       |
   ,---+.
  |    | \
   \__/   \___ 

It is unfortunate that the result seems to be that the "hash" symbol seems
to have become permanently engrained into foreign minds that it "is" the
"pound sign".  It really isn't: it was just what we had to use before the
_true_ pound sign became available.

Even now the problem remains because whilst my Macintosh keyboard provides
both hash (#) and pound sign (£) characters whether they actually _appear_
different depends very much on whether my message has got through to your
system with 8-bit ASCII characters intact (the second, real, pound sign in
the second line of this paragraph will probably have an ASCII code greater
than 127).  Even if it _has_ got through you may not see it (at all, or as
the "curly-L" pound sign as this depends on your terminal's chosen character
set and mapping!

Sigh.

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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---

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 12:04:49 -0600 (CST)

>From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
>Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 15:26:13 +0000

>>telephone?  I think its prefix is octa....

So your DTMF dial pad lacks one of

using this instead?

>     --+--
>     --+--

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 11:59:58 -0800 (PST)

On Fri, 12 Dec 1997, Mike Brudenell wrote:

MB> It is unfortunate that the result seems to be that the "hash" symbol seems
MB> to have become permanently engrained into foreign minds that it "is" the
MB> "pound sign".  It really isn't: it was just what we had to use before the
MB> _true_ pound sign became available.

Sorry to continue this off-topic discussion, but I just though I would
add a little more confusion to the mix.  In the US, the "hash" symbol
is also used to refer to "pound" as the measure of weight.  Thus we
really do use the right word, but with a different definition!