Service bureaus (Was: Tek 4051 firmware listing

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2010 Dec 13, at 2:27 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> Another skill to be learned was the ability to block-print neatly and
>> legibly, differentiating "1" from "I", "0" from "O", etc.  It was all
>> uppercase, so that simplified things somewhat.  To this day, I still
>> put a line through my "7", although I've dropped the stroke through
>> my zero as most people find it to be confusing.
>
> A long time ago, there used to be some people who put slashes through 
> the
> letter 'o', to differentiate it from the numeral '0'.  Are they ALL 
> dead
> now?
>
> One of MICROS~1's early attempts at OCR on their order forms gave 
> examples
> of how they wanted the letters formed, and included slashing the letter
> 'o'!

Years ago as an undergrad, as I was slashing my zeros and sevens (as I 
still do), a grad student tried to lecture me "decorate the alphabet, 
not the numeral system". Which may be a nice idea in principal, but it 
run counters to better-established conventions.