Source: OSNews
Article note: Neat historical scholarship. I'd occasionally wondered why some old systems drew pipe as a broken bar, but I'm happy to let someone else do the archive work. That's quite a silly tale of standards shenanigans.
In fact, the broken bar barely even exists anymore. In the days of DOS, the character used for the pipe symbol (on the DOS command line) or for logical OR (in C/C++, for example) used ASCII code 7Ch (124 decimal), which was rendered as a broken vertical bar by the fonts used at least by the IBM MDA, CGA, EGA, and VGA cards. But nowadays that is no longer the case. The same ASCII codepoint is rendered as a solid vertical bar in Windows 10 or Linux, and also shown as a solid vertical bar on contemporary keyboards. What happened?
Who doesn’t love some great character and ASCII archeology?
