7 ms·

Where are the '1' and '0' on the Bar-Lock? Or did hackers of that time do direct I/O?

• raphman 10y ago
  The same is true of other old typewriters, e.g. the one patented by Sholes [1]. Typists used l/O instead. This slightly reduced mechanical complexity. [1] https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US207559-1.png https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US207559-1...
  • koytch 10y ago
    This is so wrong… Did they use old-style figures, too? That's the only way I can imagine it might have looked OK.
    • taejo 10y ago
      In old-style figures, 1 only goes up the x-height, so that wouldn't work. But even in "typewriter" typefaces on computers, 1 and l (el, not eye) look pretty close. And the difference between O and 0 is mostly the width, which is fixed on a typewriter anyway.
    • schoen 10y ago
      I've still encountered text on the Internet that substitutes I for 1 and O for 0, presumably written by people who learned in an earlier era and haven't shaken that habit. But it's slightly hard to search for because a lot of the search results are OCR errors. Still, I'm sure not all of them are because I've seen this in newly-published news articles (maybe written by journalists or edited by editors who've been in the news business for some decades?).