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I suddenly realized what made reading old Linux books feel so nostalgic - in at least one of the books I still have, the terminal commands were all printed using broken bars for pipe, etc. You really don’t see that nowadays, but I remember it from text-based browsing, horizontal nav bars often used bar/pipe characters to separate links, and still probably do in footers and dusty corners...


> horizontal nav bars often used bar/pipe characters to separate links, and still probably do in footers and dusty corners...

You mean like in the HN footer?


If you really want to feel oldschool, try writing crosses through your zeroes as well (to distinguish them from O's).


I do, when writing by hand (and only in the job), but I'm not feeling about the crossed 0 in a computer font the same way as about the broken pipe.


Or even older school, use a capitol P for a question mark.

Or if you were fancy, a P with a / through it.


Is that a rudimentary typewriter thing?


Teletype.


Unicode killed it. They introduced a non-ASCII broken bar, and they made the ASCII bar explicitly non-broken. Fonts created in the Unicode era follow Unicode.

I will never forgive Unicode for this abomination.

By defining Unicode mappings, they also replaced the β in MS-DOS fonts with a ß. Evidently they like Germans more than they like Greeks and mathematics.

This too is an abomination. Old documents are now screwed up.


> Unicode killed it. They introduced a non-ASCII broken bar, and they made the ASCII bar explicitly non-broken. ... I will never forgive Unicode for this abomination.

I'm more upset that they allowed implementers to put lettuce on the bagel unicode emoji. Bagels are for carbs, fat, and salt, lettuce has no place. An abomination.


Who gets to decide about those kinds of things? (Also, cheese on Google’s burgers....)

Is it the implementation’s choice so long as it resembles the description?


Yes, Unicode specifically does not standardize the look of a glyph.




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