From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] Slashes
Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 09:22:55 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201607091322.u69DMtSu001030@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (raw)
If 19961 is the oldest citation the OED can come up with, "slash"
really is a coinage of the computer age. Yet the character had
been in algebra books for centuries. The oral tradition that underlies
eqn would be the authority for a "solid" name. I suspect, though,
that regardless of what the algebra books called it, the name
would be "divided by".
This is sheer hypothesis, but I have always thought that \ got
onto printer chains and type balls as a crude drawing aid. Ditto
for |. Once the characters became available people began to find
uses for them.
next reply other threads:[~2016-07-09 13:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-07-09 13:22 Doug McIlroy [this message]
2016-07-09 15:59 ` John Cowan
2016-07-11 6:44 ` Peter Jeremy
2016-07-10 14:11 ` Nemo
2016-07-10 20:23 ` pete
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2016-07-10 0:52 Doug McIlroy
2016-07-10 1:51 ` John Cowan
2016-07-11 12:09 ` Tony Finch
2016-07-11 12:34 ` John Cowan
2016-07-14 14:48 ` Christian Neukirchen
2016-07-08 14:52 [TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS) Clem Cole
2016-07-09 16:47 ` Dave Horsfall
2016-07-09 17:03 ` John Cowan
2016-07-09 17:21 ` Milo Velimirovic
2016-07-10 14:38 ` [TUHS] Slashes Christian Neukirchen
2016-07-08 11:25 [TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS) Norman Wilson
2016-07-10 18:26 ` [TUHS] Slashes Adam Sampson
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