From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo) Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 09:23:35 -0400 Subject: [COFF] On having a slash In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 13/04/2020, Dave Horsfall wrote: > Way back then, when dinosaurs strode the earth and System/360 reigned > supreme, we were taught to slash our zeros and sevens (can't quite find > the glyphs for them right now) in order to distinguish them from Oscars > and Ones for the benefit of the keypunch girls (yes, really; I had the > hots for one of them at one time, but someone else took her) on those > green sheets. > > In the time-mean I also saw a slash through "Z" (Zulu, Zed, Zee) in order > to distinguish it from a "2" (FIGURES TWO); WTF? I have always seen a slashed 7 and Z in European writing (along with exaggerated serifs on Wons). For zeroes and oscars, I dimly recall -- or possibly hallucinate -- that some primeval standard specified putting a tail on oscar and leaving zero alone. A bit of searching turned up nothing, though. N.