@enf @shadychars @widespacer New discoveries in the tricolon mystery.
I found an old Sholes & Glidden document and got it scanned. I see three uses.
1) “semigraphics,” which we knew of before.pic.twitter.com/8pFFHEYRgG
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BTW I don’t know what other character could be used for a paren – but then again tricolon was eventually replaced by $ or £ without any other changes, so maybe parents were not that useful.
A dash?
No, indeed. It's a tempting idea, but how many other truly generic characters are there? Not many, I'd think.
But there were multiple combining characters or multi-use characters right from the start. Semicolon, exclamation point. The dash could be an underscore with a half-life feed. And the dash and period were always semigraphics too.
But precisely because every key was expensive, doubling or triping up (or more) makes the most sense.
I think if I were going to waste a key on a weird character, I would have wanted it to represent capitalization
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