eno2001's Journal: LATIN CHARACTER SET: Why is the Real Cent Sign Missing?

Back when I was a kid, I remember that standard typewriters used to have the normal cent sign (the lower case 'c' with a line through it similar the lower case 's' with the line through it) as a shift character on the number keys at the top. When I started using computers I noticed that this sign is curiously missing from the latin character set. Which is why the only way to say "my two-cents worth" is to actually write out the stupid looking $0.02 instead of the better looking (imagine a line through the 'c' in the following) c2. Now I imagine that the reason for the exclusion has something to do with a decision made at some point in computer history to save a byte. But it does seem to me that the full notation of cents using the dollar notation actually consumes more bytes. Any insight into this curious situation?

Computers were designed as business machines...

[Short Circuit]

PCs were designed as business machines, with a focus on business tasks. When you're talking about accounting, it's much easier to keep track of all numbers as dollars than keep two different scales. Factor in the number of likely mistakes by not converting between the two, and it becomes an exercise in preventative maintenance of business technology.

But all this would have been decided before I was born...I have no real input to give you. :-(

We used to have it but didn't want to

[Ashtead]

Back in the days of the IBM PC, the original character set did not contain the letter ø of the Norwegian alphabet, which has the 29 letters, a-z, æ, ø, and å. Before the IBM PC, many machines, in particular printers, just used the characters following z (and Z for upper-case) in the ASCII sequences, but when the PC arrived our ø and Ø were initially missing. Soon, the "Danish-Norwegian" coding came, where the positions originally occupied by cent and yen, were re-assigned. So w

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[tomhudson]

The way I remember it was by typeing a lowercase c, then a backspace, then a slash ... I guess we were just too poor back in tohse days to afford a cent key, never mind a 2-cent key :-)

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[tomhudson]

Heck, that's nothin' ... we also didn't have a zero symbol on our teletypes - they'd type an O, then backspace and type a slash.

And our dial-in terminals with the punched-tape reader? It was so out-of-date that it no longer punched holes - just made dents in the paper tape, so we had to drag a kid in from special ed to read the tape by braille.

The worst part was when someone stole 2/3 of the columns from the hard-copy printer ... the only paper that would print 26-2/3 columns wide was toilet paper ... w