[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> ...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
> created what became POSIX preferred slash instead
>
​I can not speak for anyone else.   But at the time when I was a part of
the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs  I personally do not believe I had
ever heard of the term "​solidus." Such a term maybe had been used in my
first form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s  I had long ago
forgotten any/all of my Latin.  I certainly did not try to remember it as a
computer professional.

In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to the
asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang"  from the sound
made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from the console
TTY.  But slash was what we called the character that is now next to the
shift key on modern keyboards.   I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry.   Although interestingly
enough, the vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol was used and discussed
freely in those days.   I find it interesting that Redmond-ism became the
unshifted character, not the vertical bar by the shear force of economics
of the PC.

Clem

** For those that do not know (my apologies to those that do) the 1985
/usr/group standards committee was the forerunner to IEEE P1003.  Which we
published as the first "official UNIX API standard agreed by the community"
(I still have a hardcopy).  But neither /usr/group nor USENIX had the
political authority to bring an official standard to FIPS, ANSI, ECMA, ISO
or like, while IEEE did.  So a few months before the last meeting, Jim
Issak petitioned IEEE for standards status, and the last meeting of the
/usr/group UNIX standards meeting was very short -- about 10 minutes.   We
voted to disband and then everyone in the room officially reformed a few
minutes later all signing in as IEEE P1003, later to be called POSIX.  For
further historical note, I was a "founding member" of both groups and the
editor of a number of early drafts (numbers 5-11 IIRC), as well as the
primary author of the Tape Format and Terminal I/O sections of P1003.1.
With Keith Bostic, I would later be part of the P1003.2 and pen the
original PAX compromise.  After that whole mess I was so disgusted with the
politics of the effort, I stopping going to the POSIX mtgs.

PPS While I did not work for them at the time, you can blame DEC for the
mess with the case/character sets in the POSIX & FIPS standards.   A number
of the compromises in the standard documents were forced by VMS, 7-bit
(case insensitivity) being the prime one.   While we did get in the
rational section of document that it was suggested/advised that systems
implementations and applications code be case insensitive and 8 bit clean
so that other character sets could be supported.  However the DEC folks
were firmly against anything more than 7-bit ASCII and supporting anything
in that character set. My memory is that the IBM folks were silent at the
time and just let the DEC guys carry the torch for 1960's 7-bit US English.
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 10:52 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> We voted to disband and then everyone in the room officially reformed a
> few minutes later all signing in as IEEE P1003, later to be called POSIX.


​I should have added, the /usr/group UNIX standard document became "draft
0" of the IEEE P1003.1 after being put into "official" IEEE format, with
some magic macro work by Jim, John Quarterman, and myself.  Ah the wonders
of troff.​   And it was originally formatted on a Masscomp MC-500 which I
would bring to the IEEE meetings, which was considered a wonderment at that
time.   We could actually edit the document as we discussed it!!!   There
was no such thing as a laptop and the even the "Compaq Luggable" PC was
still a few years out.
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Nemo]

On 8 July 2016 at 10:52, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote (in part):
> I do not remember ever using, much less needed to
> refer to, the character "back slash"

printf("I do not remember ever using, much less needed to\n\
 refer to, the character \"back slash\"\n");

And thank you for the very interesting historical notes.

N.

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

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Hello.

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
 |On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso <[1]steffen at sdaoden.\
 |eu[/1]> wrote:
 |
 |...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
 |created what became POSIX preferred slash instead
 |
 |I can not speak for anyone else.   But at the time when I was a part \
 |of the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs  I personally do not believe \
 |I had ever 
 |heard of the term "solidus." Such a term maybe had been used in my fi\
 |rst form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s  I had long a\
 |go forgotten 
 |any/all of my Latin.  I certainly did not try to remember it as a com\
 |puter professional.

Of course.  It doesn't even sound friendlier with its origins in
the Roman culture, as a name for money.  I wasn't consciously
aware of this once i've responded.

 |In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to t\
 |he asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang"  from the \
 |sound made by 
 |them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from the console T\
 |TY.  But slash was what we called the character that is now next to t\

That is something to remind.  The standard has two occurrences of
bang, in the shell syntax and for the Mail variable of the same name.
And yes, young, brilliant and highly educated men and women
explore new worlds.  So splat makes a lot of sense.

If seen from this angle it is even less enjoyable that Linguists
put more prominence on the correlation of slash and solidus.

 |he shift key 
 |on modern keyboards.   I do not remember ever using, much less needed\
 | to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap t\
 |hat the folks 
 |in Redmond forced on the industry.   Although interestingly enough, t\

You mean the word?  We don't have a word for this character in
German, as far as i know.  (But you surely used it for \n \t etc.)

 |he vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol was used and discussed freely i\
 |n those days. 
 |  I find it interesting that Redmond-ism became the unshifted charact\
 |er, not the vertical bar by the shear force of economics of the PC.

This sentence prevented work and caused an interesting journey via
Wikipedia.  I am looking at a DEC VT52, from before Microsoft.
(I really like my current Apple (US) keyboard, after say twenty
years of sorrow in which i couldn't forget the robust metal
i think IBM keyboards that the administrators of the insurance my
father worked at used in their two-skyscraper-floors bunker.)

--steffen

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
 |On 8 July 2016 at 10:52, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote (in part):
 |> I do not remember ever using, much less needed to
 |> refer to, the character "back slash"
 |
 |printf("I do not remember ever using, much less needed to\n\
 | refer to, the character \"back slash\"\n");
 |
 |And thank you for the very interesting historical notes.

Fish.

--steffen

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Clem Cole wrote:

> I find it interesting that Redmond-ism became the unshifted character, 
> not the vertical bar by the shear force of economics of the PC.

Beta documents suggest M$ wanted to switch the...switch character to dash 
(-) for 2.0 and use / for the path separator, but *IBM* insisted on 
keeping / and using \ for path separator...and what IBM wanted, IBM got.

That said I think one or two OEMs did in fact set the SWITCHAR to - and 
use / for a path separator anyway.

-uso.

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Random832]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016, at 10:52, Clem Cole wrote:
> ​I can not speak for anyone else.   But at the time when I was a part
> of the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs  I personally do not believe I
> had ever heard of the term "​solidus." Such a term maybe had been used
> in my first form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s  I had
> long ago forgotten any/all of my Latin.  I certainly did not try to
> remember it as a computer professional.
>
> In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to
> the asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang"  from the
> sound made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from
> the console TTY.  But slash was what we called the character that is
> now next to the shift key on modern keyboards.   I do not remember
> ever using, much less needed to refer to, the character "back slash"
> until the unfortunate crap that the folks in Redmond forced on the
> industry.

You never had to use it for escaping in C/Regex/Troff/etc?

>  Although interestingly enough, the vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol
>  was used and discussed freely in those days.   I find it interesting
>  that Redmond-ism became the unshifted character, not the vertical bar
>  by the shear force of economics of the PC.

ASCII keyboards had \ unshifted long before the PC.  The ASR-33 didn't
have it (it didn't have pipe at all - backslash was on shift-L), but
every DEC keyboard I can find did, as did the ADM-3a, and incidentally
the Symbolics Lisp Machine's keyboard.

I had suspected the reason that [\] ended up as the unshifted characters
is because {|} were not available on uppercase-only keyboards, but I
can't find any uppercase terminals that had separate keys for them (the
ASR-33 had them on shift- KLM). I expect that's also why ^, on shift-N,
was used for pipes rather than the vertical bar in the earliest versions
of Unix that had them.

What terminals did you use, back in those days?

(Incidentally, I can find *literally no* pictures of a Teletype 37,
and no sufficiently high-quality closeups of a 38 to determine its
keyboard layout)

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Clem Cole]

Good point....  shows how good my memory is... sigh...

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8 July 2016 at 10:52, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote (in part):
> > I do not remember ever using, much less needed to
> > refer to, the character "back slash"
>
> printf("I do not remember ever using, much less needed to\n\
>  refer to, the character \"back slash\"\n");
>
> And thank you for the very interesting historical notes.
>
> N.
>
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:23 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

> What terminals did you use, back in those days?


​
Hard copy (that I remember, but we have proven how poor memory can be):​

   - ​ASR/KSR 33s originally, we had one 37 but it was not on a system I
   used
   - IBM console's printers Model numbers I've ​forgotten (but with an APL
   ball)
   - Later Xerox DaisyWheel printers Model numbers I've ​forgotten
   - Later DEC Decwritter I and II

Glass TTY (not complete but for a quick memory dump)

   - Lear Siegler ADM3 (lots of them - many people made them as kits) and
   why we have hjkl as the movement keys in vi - the arrows were embossed on
   those key tops
   - PE "Fox" (CMU has a large lot deal and these became the standard there
   in the late 70s)
   - Triple Drip "Graphic Wonders" (man I miss these with a dedicated PDP11
   and an amazing keyboard --- best game platform I ever knew)
   - Tektronix 401x series (just about all models of them) but 4014 was
   used the most
   - DEC VT52
   - Eventually, VT-100, PT-100 and a number of other VT-100 knock offs
   - Eventually Tek 4025s (until the RT, one of the best keyboards - used
   in Magnolia BTW)
   - Heathkit H19 (still have mine that I built)
   - Eventually Wyse 100's, 99GTs and Wyse 60s -- later being the best Wyse
   (I still have one)
   - Ann Arbor Ambassador (my all time favorite - wish I still had one)
   - Too many different graphics terminals to remember
   - Numerous other "dumb terminals" who's brand names I have long
   forgotten.
   - although for some reason I remember the Kimtron KT-7 being a popular
   one - memory is they were dirt cheap at the time
   - Eventually later models of DEC terminals, but the keyboard always
   sucked and had those strange DEC private connectors on them, so I tried to
   avoid them.

Clem
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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Ron Natalie]

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I started on ADM-1 (upper case only but they did have cursor addressing) and ASR-33 teletypes.   I remember using all the backslash escapes to write my first C program while Mike Muuss looked on in the UGL at Hopkins.     Later we got HP terminals with upper and lower case.

 

Hopkins had a KSR37 in the EE department with a greek type box on it even.   It was stored in a closet dubbed (obviously) “The KSR Room.”    The pennywhistle modem I had lived there.   We used to place collect calls to the Pentagon TIP (we’d tell the operator we were calling a computer and if it beeped it accepted the charges).    Later they upgraded the printing with a Diablo-ish (daisy wheel) printer.    We had such printers over in various other labs I had access to (Psych department, etc.).

 

Hopkins actually had one of the “braindamaged Hazeltines” (leave poor tilde alone) and a few ADM-3’s and for some idiotic reason the department bought a couple of SWTPC implementations of the TVTypewriterII which were just awful.  Tektronix donated a bunch of stuff to us so we ended up with both 4014-ish things and some real raster Tek graphics terminals.

 

When I went over to BRL we primarily dealt with some VT52 clones which were preferred because they  put the control key next to the A which we liked.   Eventually, we got the Teletype 5620 the commercialization of the Blit/jerq DMD terminals.     By the time I left most of us had either Suns or SGIs on our desk though.

 

At home I had an ADM-3 followed by one of the VT-52 clones and also a ASR 37 that I got surplus (It had a Rocky Flats property tag on it).    When I moved to NJ I ditched them all and just used at terminal emulator on my DOS PC-AT for the longest time.    I actually had a 9600 SLIP line and a router to the Ethernet in my house (I used one of the RU subnet numbers).  

 

 

 

From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Clem Cole
Sent: Friday, July 8, 2016 4:49 PM
To: Random832
Cc: TUHS main list
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

 

 

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:23 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

What terminals did you use, back in those days?

 

​

Hard copy (that I remember, but we have proven how poor memory can be):​

*	​ASR/KSR 33s originally, we had one 37 but it was not on a system I used
*	IBM console's printers Model numbers I've ​forgotten (but with an APL ball)
*	Later Xerox DaisyWheel printers Model numbers I've ​forgotten
*	Later DEC Decwritter I and II

Glass TTY (not complete but for a quick memory dump)

*	Lear Siegler ADM3 (lots of them - many people made them as kits) and why we have hjkl as the movement keys in vi - the arrows were embossed on those key tops
*	PE "Fox" (CMU has a large lot deal and these became the standard there in the late 70s)
*	Triple Drip "Graphic Wonders" (man I miss these with a dedicated PDP11 and an amazing keyboard --- best game platform I ever knew)
*	Tektronix 401x series (just about all models of them) but 4014 was used the most
*	DEC VT52
*	Eventually, VT-100, PT-100 and a number of other VT-100 knock offs
*	Eventually Tek 4025s (until the RT, one of the best keyboards - used in Magnolia BTW)
*	Heathkit H19 (still have mine that I built)
*	Eventually Wyse 100's, 99GTs and Wyse 60s -- later being the best Wyse (I still have one)
*	Ann Arbor Ambassador (my all time favorite - wish I still had one)
*	Too many different graphics terminals to remember
*	Numerous other "dumb terminals" who's brand names I have long forgotten.
*	although for some reason I remember the Kimtron KT-7 being a popular one - memory is they were dirt cheap at the time
*	Eventually later models of DEC terminals, but the keyboard always sucked and had those strange DEC private connectors on them, so I tried to avoid them.

Clem

 

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[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[John Cowan]

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Ron Natalie scripsit:

> Hopkins actually had one of the “braindamaged Hazeltines” (leave
> poor tilde alone)

Not the terminal's fault.  It was just implementing ASCII-63, in which
ESC was up by DEL, in the current position of ~.  Other terminals did
ASCII-67, the current standard.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
A poetical purist named Cowan                   [that's me]
Once put the rest of us dowan.                  [on xml-dev]
"Your verse would be sweeter / If it only had metre
And rhymes that didn't force me to frowan."     [overpacked line!] --Michael Kay

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Ron Natalie]

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That may have been the origin, but Hazeltine persisted even in later versions of the terminal which implemented later ASCII and had a printing ~ at 126.    That's why the comment and associated code is in the terminal driver.  In order to print a ~ you had to send it twice.


-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@ccil.org] On Behalf Of John Cowan
Sent: Friday, July 8, 2016 5:17 PM
To: Ron Natalie
Cc: 'Clem Cole'; 'Random832'; 'TUHS main list'
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

Ron Natalie scripsit:

> Hopkins actually had one of the “braindamaged Hazeltines” (leave poor 
> tilde alone)

Not the terminal's fault.  It was just implementing ASCII-63, in which ESC was up by DEL, in the current position of ~.  Other terminals did ASCII-67, the current standard.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
A poetical purist named Cowan                   [that's me]
Once put the rest of us dowan.                  [on xml-dev]
"Your verse would be sweeter / If it only had metre
And rhymes that didn't force me to frowan."     [overpacked line!] --Michael Kay

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Clem Cole wrote:

> In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to the 
> asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang"  from the sound 
> made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from the 
> console TTY. 

I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[John Cowan]

Dave Horsfall scripsit:

> I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).

Thus forcing the rest of us to quote grep patterns like '^foo$' forever.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
An observable characteristic is not necessarily a functional requirement.
        --John Hudson

[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Milo Velimirovic]

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> On Jul 9, 2016, at 12:03 PM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> 
> Dave Horsfall scripsit:
> 
>> I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).
> 
> Thus forcing the rest of us to quote grep patterns like '^foo$' forever.

It’s the $ that forces the quoting.

[TUHS] Slashes

[Christian Neukirchen]

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Milo Velimirovic <milov at cs.uwlax.edu> writes:

>> On Jul 9, 2016, at 12:03 PM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Dave Horsfall scripsit:
>> 
>>> I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).
>> 
>> Thus forcing the rest of us to quote grep patterns like '^foo$' forever.
>
> It’s the $ that forces the quoting.

Not in POSIX-compatible sh (works in tcsh even):

$ echo see$
see$

(Neither does ^ need quoting there.)

-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen at gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org

[TUHS] Slashes

[Christian Neukirchen]

John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> writes:

> Tony Finch scripsit:
>
>> I am failing to remember where I have seen /\ and \/ used in the wild.
>
> I don't think anyone ever has used them; they were just a suggestion by
> Bemer which induced him to lobby for \ in ASCII-63.

It's used now in logic languages like Prolog and proof assistants like
Coq or TLA+.

-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen at gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org

[TUHS] Slashes

[John Cowan]

Tony Finch scripsit:

> I am failing to remember where I have seen /\ and \/ used in the wild.

I don't think anyone ever has used them; they were just a suggestion by
Bemer which induced him to lobby for \ in ASCII-63.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
The present impossibility of giving a scientific explanation is no proof
that there is no scientific explanation. The unexplained is not to be
identified with the unexplainable, and the strange and extraordinary
nature of a fact is not a justification for attributing it to powers
above nature.  --The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "telepathy" (1913)

[TUHS] Slashes

[Tony Finch]

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John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>
> The Algol 60 committee is a special case, with its distinction between
> publication language, reference language, and implementation language.
> The reference language used ∨ (hence the proposed \/ convention); the
> existing implementations use either "or" as a reserved word or else |.

I am failing to remember where I have seen /\ and \/ used in the wild.

CPL's typeset descriptions have big mathematical conjunction and
disjunction operators. But I don't think I heard of composing them
out of slashes from the CPL literature.
http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/2/134.full.pdf+html

1960s BCPL manuals have a similar typographic convention to ALGOL 60.

The ALGOL 68 revised report defines all three of ∨| or for the
disjunction operator.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Fair Isle: Cyclonic, becoming westerly, except in far north, 5 or 6. Moderate
or rough. Rain or showers, fog patches. Moderate or good, occasionally very
poor.

[TUHS] Slashes

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2016-Jul-09 11:59:51 -0400, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>| was commonplace, however, as it has at least 15 mathematical uses:
>see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar#Mathematics>.
>As far as I know, it has always been used as 'or' on computers.

APL uses it for absolute value and modulo.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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[TUHS] Slashes

[pete]

On 09/07/2016 15:22, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> 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

1961 is about the time I was learning to type (in Britain), and I was 
taught it as "slash".  My mother - who was an excellent professional 
typist but never had any contact with computers - almost always referred 
to '/' as "slash".  The one exception I can recall is in the usage "... 
and/or ..." where it was sometimes spoken as "... and or or ..." 
(though often the first "or" was simply omitted).

-- 
Pete
Pete Turnbull

[TUHS] Slashes

[Adam Sampson]

norman at oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) writes:

> It's unclear exactly how far back it dates.  The earliest OED citation
> for `slash' as `A thin sloping line, thus /' is dated 1961; but the
> cite is from Webster's 3rd.

A bit of searching finds earlier American examples in the context of
livestock brands. For example, from "Hot Irons: Heraldry of the Range",
1940:

  A crude sign at a dirt turnoff will have been "painted" with a hot
  iron, reading V-/ 8.

  You may or may not know that the V Bar Slash ranch house is eight
  miles down that trail [...]

Or in State v. Craig, New Mexico, 1922:

  The calves were then placed in a corral at the Webber ranch, and
  several days later were branded by appellant with A slash brand and
  then turned into the open pasture.

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>

[TUHS] Slashes

[Nemo]

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On 9 July 2016 at 09:22, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 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".

Out of curiosity, I consulted Cajori [1].  All sorts of notations were
used to denote division (including reversed letters) in antiquity
although fractions were commonly denoted by numerator above a
separating line and denominator below.  In 1659, Johann Heinrich Rahn
introduced the symbol ÷ (period above and below a minus sign, Unicode
00F7 -- apologies if the symbol does not display) for division, having
been previously used to indicate subtraction.   In 1684, G.W. Liebniz
introduced ':' for division.  Later authors used both solidus and
reverse-solidus to indicate division.  (Frustratingly, Cajori never
gives a name to the symbol '/'.)

Here is the start of Para. 240 (shades of Algol vs C): "There are
perhaps no symbols which are as completely observant of political
boundaries as are ÷ [Unicode 00F7] and : as symbols for division.  The
former belongs to Great Britain, the British dominions, and the United
States.  The latter belongs to Continental Europe and the
Latin-American countries."  In 1923, the US National Committee on
Mathematical Requirements recommended dropping ÷ (Unicode 00F7) in
favour of the symbol '/' (again nameless).

Bemer, an IBM engineer, argued that the Selectric type ball should be
designed to carry 64 characters required for ASCII, rather than the
typewriter standard 44
(http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric).  The
suggestion was dismissed.  Knuth, in his TeXbook, refers to
"non-mathematical slashes" and entries for virgule and solidus say
"See slash".

[1] A History Of Mathematical Notations Vol I

N.

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[John Cowan]

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Doug McIlroy scripsit:

> So "always" is ever since it became available. 

Yes, I meant that the meaning of | was never anything but "or" until it
came to be used as "pipe" (not only in shells but also in Perl and other
places), not that the representation of "or" has never been anything
but |.

> Was PL/I the first to adopt it?

I can't imagine anyone would do so until it was available.  The Algol
60 committee is a special case, with its distinction between publication
language, reference language, and implementation language.  The reference
language used ∨ (hence the proposed \/ convention); the existing
implementations use either "or" as a reserved word or else |.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths
led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen.  I am the clue-finder,
the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number.  --Bilbo

[TUHS] Slashes

[Doug McIlroy]

> As far as I know, it [|] has always been used as 'or' on computers.

I was on the NPL (eventually PL/I) committee when IBM 'generously'
increased the 360 character set from 48 to 60. George Radin grabbed
| for OR, before IBM announced the character set. Previously
the customary use for | in logic was the "Scheffer stroke", which 
we now know as NAND. So "always" is ever since it became available. 
Was PL/I the first to adopt it?

Doug

[TUHS] Slashes

[John Cowan]

Doug McIlroy scripsit:

> 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.

<http://www.bobbemer.com/BACSLASH.HTM> tells us that \ was introduced
into ASCII by Bob Bemer in order to make \/ for 'or' and /\ for 'and'
available, primarily for the use of Algol 60.  It had not been available
in any manufacturer's character set before ASCII-63, as far as is known.
Unfortunately, none of the five existing Algol 60 implementations actually
support these sequences.

| was commonplace, however, as it has at least 15 mathematical uses:
see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar#Mathematics>.
As far as I know, it has always been used as 'or' on computers.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves.
        --Murray Gell-Mann

[TUHS] Slashes

[Doug McIlroy]

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.