John W. Kennedy wrote:
Just as with quotation marks, Unicode is trying to undo confusion introduced by cost-saving measures applied to Victorian typewriters. (I have seen people -- usually in their late 50's or older -- who will, if not stopped, use lower-case "L" instead of the digit "one" and sometimes even upper-case "O" instead of digit "zero".)
Oh man, that takes me back! I learned how to type back in the '70s on an old manual typewriter. I had forgotten how it didn't have those keys! I can also remember forming an exclamation mark with an apostrophe, back-space, and period. And of course, no ~`[]{}<>\ or |.
And Dan Rather can tell you about the lack of any kind of real super- or sub-scripting back then, too.
Actually, a good IBM executive typewriter of the early 70's could do all those things. The "document experts" who claimed otherwise were lying, either about period typewriters, or about being experts.
(Whether the documents were genuine or not is a different issue, and thoroughly off-topic.)
--
John W. Kennedy
"The pathetic hope that the White House will turn a Caligula into a Marcus Aurelius is as na�ve as the fear that ultimate power inevitably corrupts."
-- James D. Barber (1930-2004)
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