The vertical bar and broken bar - a bit of history

Discussions
1

A walk through, from 1960’s ASCII, 1970’s ISO and ASCII, to 1980’s PC, ISO, and ECMA: a story of compromise and change, the PL/I fraternity being at one time a force to reckon with. Is 7C to stand for a bar, a broken bar, or something else?

3 Likes
2

This has been always confusing to me. (The two bars on modern keyboards certainly didn’t help.)

Fun fact: The IBM 029 standard E’L character set (1964) used also a solid bar (12-8-7), even in its most stylized forms:

500×515 51.3 KB

1 Like