8/14/2019 The Demise of the Cent Sign

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When I was a boy, not so long ago, there was a thing called the cent sign. Itlooked like this:

It was the dollar sign's little brother, and lived on comic books covers and innewspaper advertisements and on pay phones and wherever anything was beingsold for less than a buck. It was a popular punctuation symbolno questionmark, or dollar sign, certainly, but just behind the * in popularity, and Idaresay well ahead of #, &, and the now Internet-hot @. It owned an unshiftedspot on the typewriter keyboard, just to the right of the semicolon, and waspart of every third grader's working knowledge.

In the late 1990s, you don't see many cent signs. Why? Because hardlyanything costs less than a dollar anymore? Actually, the demise of the cent signhas little to do with inflation, and everything to do with computers. Andtherein lies a tale.

In the 1960s a disparate group of American computer manufacturers (basically,everyone but IBM) got together and agreed on an encoding standard thatbecame known as ASCII ("ass-key"The American Standard Code for InformationInterchange). This standard simply assigned a number to each of the varioussymbols used in written communication (e.g., A-Z, a-z, 0-9, period, comma). Astandard made it possible for a Fortran program written for a Univac machine

to make sense to a programmer (and a Fortran compiler) on a Control Datacomputer. And for a Teletype terminal to work with a Digital computer, and soon.

So-called text files, still in widespread use today, consist of sequences of thesenumbers (or codes) to represent letters, spaces, and end-of-lines. Texteditors, for example, the Windows Notepad application, display ASCII codes aslines of text on your screen so that you can read and edit them. Similarly, anASCII keyboard spits out the value 65 when you type a capital 'A,' 65 being theASCII code for 'A.'

The committee decided on a seven bit code; this allowed for twice as manycharacters as existing six bit standards, and permitted a parity bit on eight bittape. So there were 128 slots to dole out, and given the various non-typographic computing agendas to attend to, it was inevitable that somecommon symbols, including several that had always been on typewriterkeyboards, wouldn't make the cut. (The typewriter layout had certain obviousfailings in computer applications, for example: overloading the digit 1 andlower case L, so it couldn't be blindly adopted.)

8/14/2019 The Demise of the Cent Sign

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Three handy fractions were cut: . This makes sense, especially whenyou consider that the ASCII committee was composed of engineers. I'm surethey thought, in their engineer's way, "Why have but not 1/3? And if wehave 1/3, then why not 1/5? Or 3/32?" Similarly, the committee apparentlyfound $0.19 an acceptable, if somewhat obtuse, way of expressing the price of

a Bic pen. At any rate, the popular and useful cent sign didn't make it.

And so the cent sign was off keyboards, terminals, and printers. Not that manypeople noticed right away. The companies behind ASCII sold big, expensivecomputers that were used to run businesses, and few cared that there wasn't acent sign character on one's new line printer. Heck, if your printer couldhandle lower-case letters, you were state of the art.

But when personal computers began to appear in the late 1970s, the primaryapplication driving their adoption was word processing. These new smallcomputers used the ASCII standardafter all, that's what standards are for. By

the millions, typewriter keyboards (with ) were traded in for Apple IIs and IBMPCs (without ). While it's true that the cent sign was ultimately made part ofother larger encoding standards, and is possible to create at modern PCs with alittle effortthe damage had been done. Without a cent key in front of them,writers of books, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements made dowithout. And over time, $0.19 began to look like the right way to say 19. Inanother few years the cent sign will look as alien as those strange S's ourforefathers were using when they wrote the constitution.