In the late 1960's some IBM system programmers decided to use the solidus (slash) through the letter "O" to differentiate it from the simple circle that was used for zero at Sylvania's Electronic Defense Laboratories where I worked as a writer.
It turned up in thousands of pages of output. I don't know if it was an IBM corporate decision or one made by the hordes of programmers in white coats who ministered to the huge room full of spinning tape drives and blinking lights at the Sylvania facility. (Yes, if you've ever seen an old James Bond movie about a computer center with all the tape drives, blinking lights and other "gee-gaws", the real thing looked like that in the 60's. We mere "mortals" had a second-story walkway, safely outside the walls, where we could peer through windows and down at the white-coated servants as they scurried about between rows of tape drives and other mysterious racks of equipment serving the needs of the big machine.) The slashes through every letter "O" made reading anything in "plain English" produced by the system very difficult. That practice died a fairly quick and certain death. Perhaps it was because all of us writers, engineers and others who had to actually read the output of the system converged outside of the computer facility with pitchforks, burning torches and the like. As Mark pointed out, Digital and some others followed the communications industry standard and put the solidus through their zeros, just as telegraphers had done for a century by the mid 50's and teletypes and telex machines had done for decades by then. With appropriate prodding, the programmers on the Sylvania IBM system followed suit. Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- We used a slashed zero on DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) computers. My experience with them was from 1966 to about 1975. At the time others were using a rounded O(letter oh) and a squared 0(zero). I found the slashed zero much easier to use. Mark AD5SS _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
