My uncle used to run this back in 1993 in Helsinki. Good times. Love the hair styles and the jungle soundtrack. Coming from BBS's, the web and IRC blew my mind.
I wish I could find my old geocities page now. I'm sure it had a few transparent gif explosions on it.
To be fair, I was 9 and didn't know any other words in English either.
# in internet-contexts has transitioned to "hashtag" (remains "firkant" in voice response), but as far as I know snabel-a is still in use (I just realised that I haven't participated in a Danish verbal transmission of an email address in quite a while).
In Swedish you can hear "snabel-A" (trunk-A, same as in Danish) or "at".
Nowadays it's usually called "ät-merkki" as in "at-sign" as "at" is spelled in Finnish.
In Poland it is still called Małpa, which means monkey.
I had a web design professor who said its "true" name was octothorpe, and while various sources confirm that, I've never heard anyone else call it that. Another student in the same class once called it the "tic tac toe symbol."
It's as if people who call # the pound sign are from the UK and typed shift-3 on someone else's keyboard without actually noticing what showed up on the screen.
#prescriptivism.
I think I have some Googling to do. :)
12 widgets @ £12ea
Having seen that usage (coming from a family that ran a small business), the email address notation made sense straight away.
On the other hand, I probably pronounced the dot in ".com" as "point" at least once, before hearing it read aloud by someone else.
Then around 1997, the internet was something that you went to the library to use. And we finally had a computer at home. I remember how long it took us to figure out that the mouse tail should point up, not down.
I did buy an Atari 2500St for college, and didn't tell anyone. I felt like I was cheating.
While all the other students were griping about typing, or paying a typist; I just hit print.
My girlfrined in college hated the "thing". Yes--she called it the "thing". "Leave that thing alone."
She is now a millionaire, and head of technology at some company.
After college, I bought a small electronic typewritter, that did word processing.
I hated everything about computing, besides word processing, and didn't see the need for a computer if I wasen't in school.
Plus, I tried programming, and I Knew I didn't want to spend my life in front of a screen, for anyone, for any amout of money. I hated those 500 page computer programming phone books. I just hated computing on so many levels, it's ironic now.
I honesly didn't get the magic in programming until later on--a lot later on. Well that Atari went right into the garbage in the 90's. Yes--ouch! I so wish I had it now.
I don't think people realize, in the 90's, it was really a gamble if the average person would buy a computer, even a GUI based system. Some people just hated everything about them. They were just so unsexy. So dry to many of us. So boring. So tedious, and never seemed to just work.
I had a friend remind me in the 90's computing is an art too. He is now a multimillionaire. We worked at a chit job, and his friend's said, "My dad is willing to invest in a gaming company for us. Do you want to join?" He did have to think about it. In a few years he was set for life. He didn't ask me to join them, but I probally would have turned the offer down. I idnt get games, nor did I think the business would last more than a few months. Awe--again, so wrong!
My mom was one of the first to buy a used blue Mac, and she loved every thing about it. It was then, I knew they would be big, and I was so wrong. I figured if she was willing to try them, they are making strides, at least Apple.
I still didn't find the magic in computing/programming until about 15 years ago--sadly.
Interesting to see that T1 was quite expensive back then even in NYC. I clearly remember in 1996 getting one of the first ISDN connections in the country - $1000/month for a whopping 128KB connection in the days of 33.6KB dial up. Ah, the memories...
In the video, he said they had no money for it, but that is quite possibly the most expensive way to cool a server.
Some friends and I worked on the original Speakeasy RAIN (Remote Access Internet Node) servers that were essentially a 486 host that booted Linux off of a floppy disk. We installed 4/8 port Cyclades serial cards and attached recycled Wyse dumb terminals to them. The attached modem dialed back to the Speakeasy mothership and allowed users in Seattle to read their email from places like The Alibi Room, the Sit & Spin, and Cafe Allegro. We processed credit cards so non Speakeasy users could use the system, and when their time was up we utilized a hacked up version of GNU Screen to pop open a text window to let them agree to pay for more time or to disconnect.
It was a pretty sweet setup, I remember remotely upgrading the "firmware" on the RAIN nodes by scping the new tomsrtbt disk image to /dev/fd0 and then rebooting. Those were the days. It's hard to imagine Seattle hipsters happily camped out on old dumb terminals in bars and cafes using Lynx to surf the web, and Pine to read their email, but it happened.
I never lived in Seattle, but every time I visited (from California) I made it a point to stop by the Speakeasy nearly every day... and sometimes in the evening as well to take in a show. It's fun to hear from someone like yourself who was involved in the magic!
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/03/business/waiter-oh-waiter-...
Anybody have more numbers from that era?
Klammer is short for Büroklammer (= paper clip) and Affe is monkey (or ape).
I've always known # as representing "number", which is why you see it in lists: #1, #2, #3 etc.
A symbol that, after many decades of living in the U. S., I'm seeing for the first time just today. In my experience, if it's not written as "lb." or "lbs.", a hash is often used: "#".
# is never, ever, ever called the "pound sign" in Britain or Ireland. That's always £.
Ok, the true pedants can tilt their head a little to see the difference between a # and a [Edit: Hmm it seems HN doesn't support pasting of extended characters such as the musical 'sharp'?!?]...
I will have to change the pronunciation in my C# programming books to 'C-hash' instead of 'C-sharp'... :)
An octagon is a shape. A stop sign is a symbol that happens to be an octagon. Inversely, an octagon in the context of street signs represents "stop."
The octothorpe, used in music, represents "sharp." In front of a number it represents "pound." In front of a string on twitter it represents "hashtag."
AFAIK the typographical/visual differences are basically irrelevant. It's just a different symbol with a different meaning in different contexts, all represented with the same shape.
# - octothorpe [2]
Different symbols, though very similar.
(Edit: So much so that the true sharp symbol apparently does not render correctly on HN)
IMO, yeah, maybe not the best choice by MSFT. But pragmatically, we all know what "#" means in that context even if it's not correct. All the Monday-morning-quarterbacking in the world isn't going to change that. So I'm as all for an academic discussion as the next person, but that's all it is.
Yes, the pound sign is different than the sharp symbol, just as single quotes are different than apostrophes, and guillemets are different than less-than and greater-than symbols, and the flat symbol is different than "b".
Now, limitations of first common US typewriters and then the ASCII character set have led to conventions where some of these have been used in place of the other because the correct symbol wasn't available, but that's different than the symbols being the same, and in most modern contexts, the correct symbol is usually available.
