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> the character you'd get on a traditional U.S. keyboard layout

I use a different layout so I'd never realised there was method to the madness! I get the following

$ echo -n ' !@#$%^&*(' | xxd -p 2021402324255e262a28



It’s more the old TTY layout which differs somewhat from the modified typewriter layout that’s become standard for computer keyboards. The old Apple ][ keyboard had 1–9 corresponding to the next row in ASCII, shift-0 was @, I think other characters were ±16 based on shift. Early ASCII implementations were often slightly inconsistent but codings were often based on keyboard layouts.


The order of the punctuation descends from the very first typewriters, in the late 19th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Remington_2_typewriter_ke...


The @ for shift-2 replaced the earlier " which you would see on many 1980s-era PCs.

I forget the story about what changed for shift-6 through shift-9.

When I say "traditional U.S. keyboard layout" I mean to contrast this with the modern one, which is the same as what you and I have.




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