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My younger self would have used the umlaut character for 'ditto'. To some extent the character set was still evolving, for example the Euro sign was not around
by Theodores 2y ago
My younger self would have used the umlaut character for 'ditto'.
To some extent the character set was still evolving, for example the Euro sign was not around until decades later and that would need to be bolted together with backspace characters or escape codes, maybe even downloaded characters, with the printer specific manual (Epson) studied at great length.
In the DOS era (and before with home micros that were programmed in BASIC) it was quite normal to compose things for the printer that you had no expectation of seeing on screen, not that anyone read much on screen (as everyone had vast piles of paper on their desk).
Until quite recently some POS systems were very much tied in to a very specific printer, at least these character sets were a step forward from hard coding a BASIC program to an exact make and model of printer.
- rmccue 2y agoNever heard of an umlaut being used for a ditto mark, usually it’s a double quote: " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditto_mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditto_mark Guessing maybe there’s some keyboards which were missing quote/prime characters but had umlauts?
- Theodores 2y agoCreative use of early Epson printers was something I wasted a lot of time with, never with a word processor, because they did not really exist unless you paid hundreds of pounds to get one. I was coding forms for tabular data, doing silly things because the printed manual made that too tempting, so any excuse to use a character or escape code sequence was fair game. This was in an era when handwriting was commonly used so the convention for 'ditto' could be freestyled by me to be middle dots, umlauts or anything CHR(). The convenience of the keyboard, in an era before the PC was not really there.