Timeline for Did the Tironian "et" ("⁊") have any impact on the ampersand being shift + 7 on English keyboards?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 1, 2015 at 0:42 | vote | accept | Patrick M | ||
| Oct 13, 2014 at 15:33 | comment | added | supercat | @PatrickM: There might conceivably be some meat to it if the first typewriter with an ampersand put it on the seven, but other typewriter or keyboard makers didn't know the significance of the choice. I do certainly find it interesting that typewriters pretty well standardized 1, 3, 4, and 5 in their present positions; I wonder if there's any significance to those associations. | |
| Oct 13, 2014 at 15:05 | comment | added | Patrick M | Right. I can't count. Or type. And it would help if I learned to read. That does make it pretty clear that the only real meat left to the question is about the history of keyboards and the 7-ish tironian et is a red herring in the history of the ampersand. | |
| Oct 10, 2014 at 16:17 | comment | added | supercat | @PatrickM: The placement of characters within the ASCII set was motivated by their placement on keyboards. If the association of "7" and "&" was as well established as the associations of 1, 3, 4, and 5 with "!", "#", "$", and "%", then 0x27 would have been an ampersand, and the apostrophe would have some other code. | |
| Oct 10, 2014 at 16:01 | comment | added | Patrick M | Sure, but the question then becomes which came first? A typewriter with a 7-& on it or ASCII? I have a hunch it wasn't ASCII, @tripleee. That's why I asked for a citation on the typewriter keyboards. | |
| Oct 10, 2014 at 7:23 | comment | added | tripleee | Isn't that fairly obvious just from looking at an ASCII chart? | |
| Oct 10, 2014 at 1:34 | comment | added | Patrick M | +1. If you come up with a source/reference for the typewriter keyboard shift + number associations, I will accept. | |
| Oct 9, 2014 at 23:30 | history | answered | supercat | CC BY-SA 3.0 |