This is one of the great things about this age. The barrier of reaching out to some person and asking them a question has never been lower. I've done this for RFCs, I've done this for questions about blog posts I've discovered here on HN. I've gotten lots of responses from people and it's always been illuminating to me.
I actually had a typewriter without one. I would simulate it with S <backspace> / which was not very satisfactory but generally understandable in context.
It's also very interesting to me that [1] mentions it can have one or two bars but in the list above the double-barred version is not only not in unicode but refers specifically to the cifrão[2].
I guess the TLDR is currency stuff is confusing and nonstandard more often than not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol#List_of_curren...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peso
> In most countries of the Americas, the symbol commonly known as dollar sign, "$", was originally used as an abbreviation of "pesos" and later adopted by the dollar. The dollar itself actually originated from the peso or Spanish dollar in the late 18th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign#History
> The symbol appears in business correspondence in the 1770s from Spanish America, the early independent U.S., British America and Britain, referring to the Spanish American peso,[1][2] also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in British America. Those coins provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792, and for the larger coins of the new Spanish American republics, such as the Mexican peso, Argentine peso, Peruvian real, and Bolivian sol coins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar
> Most theories trace the origin of the "$" symbol, which originally had two vertical bars, to the pillars of Hercules wrapped in ribbons that appear on the reverse side of the Spanish dollar.[6] ¶ The term peso was used in Spanish to refer to this denomination, (...)
I wonder if it is a coincidence that "peso" sounds pretty similar to "piece of"
(From) latin, pensum.
Piece, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/piece#etymonline_v_14956
c. 1200, pece, "fixed amount, measure, portion;" c. 1300, "fragment of an object, bit of a whole, slice of meat; separate fragment, section, or part," from Old French piece "piece, bit portion; item; coin" (12c.), from Vulgar Latin pettia, probably from Gaulish pettsi (compare Welsh peth "thing," Breton pez "piece, a little"), perhaps from an Old Celtic base kwezd-i-, from PIE root kwezd- "a part, piece" (source also of Russian chast' "part").
So yes, it looks like coincidence.
(Peso is a word in Spanish and up until modern times, there's very little transfer from English to Spanish)
Off the top of my head, whiskey is the oldest, but I'm sure there's probably something much older
More specifically with respect to English, though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Germa... says that bote comes from Old English "bāt" via Middle English "boot" and then Old French "bot". The other words in that category include arlequín, este, norte, oeste, and sur/sud-. But when did those words make the jump into Spanish? Some, like arlequín, were fairly recent!
"Old French" was supposedly spoken up to the mid-14th century, so words that came into Spanish directly from Old French probably came in before 01375 CE. But there's always the possibility that the word lingered for a century or three in some intermediate dialect like Occitan or Catalan before making it into Spanish. Unfortunately I don't know of any resource in Spanish comparable to the OED or Etymonline to find old Spanish attestations.
However, the earliest attestation given in https://archive.org/details/oed07arch/page/836/mode/1up?view... is from 01575, in Scots: "To be payit all in half mark pecis," and the first attestation of "piece of eight" is from 01610: "Round trunkes, Furnish'd with pistolets, and pieces of eight." Maybe Etymonline knows of a much earlier attestation? Because if "piece" in the sense of "coin" really didn't come into use until the late 16th century, a phonetic influence would be much more plausible.
______
† "Peso", like "poise", is from Latin "pensum", "weight", which may be from "pensare", the frequentative of "pendere", "to hang, to weigh", while "piece" comes from Latin "petia" or "pecia", "fragment". In Spanish today "peso" is still the normal word for "weight" (and "pesar" is the normal verb for "weigh") and "pieza" is still a fairly common word for "fragment".
Some of the older Baudot code ones actually had a £ but not a $ symbol. After we'd decided that 5-key chorded keyboards were not the way forwards, and made QWERTY ones, we still had this encoding to deal with: https://hackaday.com/2015/09/27/demonstrating-baudot-code/
The US version then put the $ sign on what we'd today call ^D, which originally was ENQ (a code that still exists in ascii today, and was sort of the pre-TCP version of a SYN).
Of course I was 100% incorrect as $ is in fact the end-of-line marker so now I just remember that "it's the opposite"!
"No, the other left..."
For me it was easier to remember what ^ was, as it looks like a pointer of sorts, so felt natural it would be the beginning. Like how a string variable points to the first character.
Trying to consciously think about the gut-feeling that makes me remember this, all I can come up with is that $ feels "heavier" than ^, which just leads it to naturally feel like the end of a line. Perhaps its verticalness makes it feel like the vertical blinking cursor, and that's what this gut-feeling is really about? I'm not sure, the mind is a mystery sometimes haha.
Start with . and .*, then add additional stuff as you get comfortable
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/always-more-history/
Whether that explains the use of tilde and caret, I dont know.
The 1965 draft had _ instead https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363831.363839
The first standard edition with _ was 1968 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc20
The 1977 version is also available https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub1-2-197...
Xerox PARC used ASCII 1963 (for reasons I have yet to unearth) so its programming languages Mesa and SmallTalk used ← for assignment and camelCase to separate words in identifiers. This stylistic quirk was carried over to later object-oriented programming languages.
That's how I remembered them anyhow
There is also Pascal's ^pointer syntax for the other end of things.
I mean. Fair enough. I guess.
Could it be a similar reason?
The standard QWERTY layout for the number key row is `/~, 1/!, 2/@, 3/#, 4/$, 5/%, 6/^, 7/&, 8/*, 9/(, 0/), -/_, =/+. I don't know how far back the mapping of shift keys for the numbers go, but I'd be shocked if there was any around the 1960s or 1970s that put them like your AZERTY keyboard.