[GreenKeys] 120vdc connectors - opinions?

Tue Jun 26 23:40:18 EDT 2018

Back in the early 1980s, after I got out of the Navy, the company I went to work for required us to use slashed letter O for the task code on our time cards. If you slashed a zero or failed to slash a letter O, you would get your time card back the next week with a note that it needed to be corrected. The time cards looked like a punch card, but I never did find out if they punched them or if a data entry operator entered them from a terminal. A couple of years later, after returning from a field assignment, I learned that the bean counters used an IBM mainframe. On the other hand, engineering mainly used DEC products. We had company wide DEC-20 mainframes, departmental VAXs from the 11/730 up to the 11/785 and PDP-11s for smaller tasks, such as running shaker tables. I never saw a slashed letter O on a DEC computer. In the mid 1980s, one of the DEC-20s still had a card reader attached and I was told that someone occasionally submitted a card deck.

> On Jun 26, 2018, at 9:14 PM, Jordan Spencer Cunningham <js at cunni.co> wrote:
> 
> Keelan,
> 
> I think you're absolutely correct about the bulk of the manual being typeset by a human on a typewriter. Also, there is no actual evidence that IBM mainframes specifically utilized a slashed O-- at least there's none I know of. The Wikipedia article in question has nothing to go on by stating IBM, and I regret paraphrasing that bit.
> 
> The code examples, however, don't appear to be O characters with a slash overstrike to me-- they look like the regular slashed zero common in teleprinters as they don't suffer from the floating slash on the O like in the likely typewritten bulk of the manual. It's even possible that whatever system this was was programmed to print out a slashed zero for every O and could have used any common teleprinter of the day.
> 
> Whether this means it was IBM or some forgotten manufacturer/programmer swapped the slashed zero for O in I/O printouts is uncertain (probably the latter if anything), but to me this is indicative that some system somewhere utilized slashed O characters. Either that or someone in the 60s went through a LOT of effort for no reason to create a manual with code examples where every O is a slashed O.
> 
> Regardless of the truth behind this mystery (I'd be interested to validate it at some point), it's still apparent that computer systems utilizing a slashed O, if they really existed beyond a university's frankenstein system, are about as far away from the rule as possible.
> 
> --Jordan
> 
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 7:34 PM, <keelan at beefchicken.com <mailto:keelan at beefchicken.com>> wrote:
> Regarding the IBM claim in Wikipedia, I will copy-paste my response to another greenkeyer that contacted me off-list about this:
> 
> Take the Wikipedia article with a grain of salt: the reference that the article uses to back up its IBM claim is tenuous at best: a BASIC manual written at Dartmouth in 1964. Yes, the linked manual uses slashed letter Os in all code examples, but the manual was also most likely typewritten, and contains numerous mathematical symbols [and underlines] added with pen. The slashed Os appear to be the result of an overstrike operation, rather than as a directly printed character.
> 
> Further to the above, the document in question was produced in 1964. It has straight quotes, double hyphens for em-dashes and clumsy hyphenation; any typesetter worth his salt would quit drinking before committing those crimes. It appears to have proportional letter spacing, which rules out bog standard typewriters. That leaves us with more elaborate machines such as the Varityper and IBM Executive Selectric. The Selectric's font repertoire is definitely more "utilitarian" (hideous) than Varityper's offerings, so I'm inclined to say this was produced on a Selectric.
> 
> Oh, and the final nail in the coffin: If you look at a number of examples of slashed Os in the aforementioned manual, you'll notice that the '/' wanders around on the 'O'. It's never in the same place twice. Either they had an entire font full of varieties of slashed Os, or this is smoking gun that this document was set by a human on a typewriter.
> 
> - Keelan
> 
> 
> 
> June 26, 2018 4:58 PM, "Jordan Spencer Cunningham" <js at cunni.co <mailto:%22Jordan%20Spencer%20Cunningham%22%20%3Cjs at cunni.co%3E>> wrote:
> 
> Also a computer person here, and I've never seen a slashed O representing Oh, only ever slashed zeroes or plain zeroes representing zero, even on all the older computers I've worked with where standards were more inconsistent.
> That being said, I have read that some mainframe manufacturers including IBM did utilize the slashed O to represent Oh but later flipped it to represent zero when they came to their senses. You can see an example of this in some of the commands listed in this old BASIC manual: http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf <http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf> (e.g. FØR X = 1 TØ 100). The funny thing is that these mainframes were most likely all using some kind of teleprinter as a terminal; I am not aware of a printer that used slashed O for Oh, but then I'm not so familiar with the later machines from the 60s/70s. IBM did manufacture some teleprinters or teleprinter-like machines, though, so they could have easily selected their own typeface that way.
> Backslashes are often a bit of a pain, though they have their purpose if you're escaping a special character in code or scripts (I've used more than my fair share of backslashes in sed commands). I suppose I can think of debatably better methodologies for escaping or avoiding having to escape in the first place by better language/interpreter design, but backslash escaping is too entrenched now and will probably haunt us for another century. Windows, of course, has completely abused the backslash by utilizing it as a delimiter in path structures when the rest of the sane world uses forward slashes as God intended.
> --Jordan
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 3:28 PM, <keelan at beefchicken.com <mailto:keelan at beefchicken.com>> wrote:
> 
> Computer person here,
> 
> In all my years, I have never seen a slashed O represent anything but a 0.
> 
> But, don't get me started on the back slash: '\', which is without-a-doubt the most infuriating invention of the computer universe. I can only imagine that the inventors of the back slash were all sitting around the exhaust of a diesel backup generator of one of their computers, and were suffering from the deleterious effects of carbon monoxide poisoning when that atrocity of a glyph was invented. It manages to be both confusing and redundant at the same time.
> 
> - Keelan
> 
> 
> June 26, 2018 2:14 PM, "Richard Knoppow" <1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com <mailto:1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com>> wrote:
> 
> > Those of us that grew up with Morse code are familiar with
> > using an 0 with a slash through it for zero and a plain O for the
> > letter Oh. The computer people do this backward with the slashed
> > symbol for Oh and the plain one for zero. I've found many
> > instances where the computer folks use a well established term
> > for something completely different. I think they all live in a
> > parallel universe.
> >
> > On 6/25/2018 10:51 PM, Paul Birkel wrote:
> >
> >> Indeed. I learned the nomenclature backwards, courtesy of DEC
> >> circa 1972. Took more than 40 years to set me straight :->.
> >
> > --
> > Richard Knoppow
> > 1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com <mailto:1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com>
> > WB6KBL
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