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?
I don’t remember seeing a slotted “¦”, even on DOS machines, but it probably switched over long before my time.
http://www.charstable.com/_site_media/ascii/chars-table-landscape.jpg
I do find it weird that the keyboard is labeled as “¦” but it comes up as “|”. I hadn’t given it much thought, but if I had to guess before the article I might have guessed that it was derived from one of those old segmented displays sometimes used to render symbols. I’d have been wrong, but that’s what it reminds me of.
Much like ꙮ today, it has little use outside of silly trivia…
https://www.osnews.com/story/135325/unicode-15-0-0-adds-more-eyes-to-%ea%99%ae/
At least in the US I certainly remember it being depicted mostly as a broken vertical bar on PC keyboards, at least as late as the 90’s, though I think I remember seeing single segment vertical bars on keyboards as well.
Yeah, it was a broken vertical bar in the 80’s, I do remember it an being very confused about it. Its segmented on Us layout model m keyboards. I kind of remember it also being that way on pine in AIX, but can’t recall that well I might just be associating anything strange with that particular set up, because it was part of a strange switching back and forth between some odd Vax editor , DOS, and AIX.
Switching to a virtual console on Slackware I get a broken bar but that could just be the font?
I found this site showing a list of fonts extracted from ROM.
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
After you click on a font, you can type in your own text to show how the font renders characters. I looked at a few…
IBM CGA … VGA has “¦”, as with the majority of ROMs I looked at..
But IBM XGA, Philips and HP have “|”,
Also IBM PC DOS includes it’s own fonts with “|”, which supersedes the ROM font.
MSDOS isn’t listed,
Out of the box I recall our old IBM PS/2 Model 30 displaying a broken line via the MCGA video.
Not sure what version of DOS that was, I know I installed MS-DOS 6.22 later but not sure if it changed anything.
Nostalgianerd on youtube made a short documentary explaning the bar and broken bar keys pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BktIY7VbrUs
Your video contains another data point for a compaq running msdos 6.22.
This may answer Moochman’s inquiry earlier about msdos as it does not appear to use a custom font with “|” like ibm pc dos.
Besides being informative on the topic of “|”, the video also alludes to why “delete” is all ones in binary. It goes back to punch cards; any character can be deleted by punching out all the remaining holes. If you make a mistake with a hole punch, you can delete that character and keep going. That’s an obsolete benefit, but it makes a lot of sense for the punch card era.
Yeah, this is a nice find! This is the font that was being displayed on that old PS/2 Model 30 8086, apparently:
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_model30r0
Brings back memories…
Not that it means a lot in this context, but the Amiga keyboard also had a “broken bar” until the early A500/A2000 models, then it switched to a “solid” bar with late A500s and A600s/A1200s