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Seems to be an artifact of the teletype system. From the bottom of page 4: > The third observation is that we only use capital letters, and that the letter "Oh
by kesslern 6y ago
Seems to be an artifact of the teletype system. From the bottom of page 4:
> The third observation is that we only use capital letters, and that the letter "Oh" is distinguished from the numeral "Zero" by having a diagonal slash through the "Oh". This feature is made necessary by the fact that in a computer program it is not always possible to tell from the context whether the letter or number was intended unless they have different appearance. The distinction is made automatically by the teletype machine, which also has a special key for the number "One" to distinguish it from the letter "Eye" or lower case "L".
- dboreham 6y agoThis implies they were using the same character code for O,0 and l,1. Definitely not ASCII so perhaps some 5-channel code? IBM 716?
- Someone 6y agoThat was common on early typewriters. Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholes_and_Glidden_typewriter#/media/File%3ASholes-Glidden_1874.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholes_and_Glidden_typewriter#... https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/2b4y0d/why_is_there_no_1_or_0_on_my_underwood_typewriter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/2b4y0d/why_is_...