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So you Brits were running your economy off of LSD for years? That explains a bit...
That goes back to the Romans. And we're not the only country to do it in modern times, though some (like Italy and Turkey) saw their £ fall so far as to eliminate any purpose for the S or D subdivisions.
Yes, lets. Its no more stupid than anything else to do with Brexit.
And think of all the money that can be made by moving to another currency! All the stuff that costs 10p can mysteriously now cost 1s instead! But it would please all the really old codgers who were used to Lsd as kids.
Mind you, actually making the coins would probably get outsourced to the French and Dutch 'for financial reasons'..
Pre-decimal pennies were denoted by "d" (for denarii). The middle item, shillings, was postfixed s (solidi)
Shillings came via Germanic (skilling) which may didn't come from solidus. The shorthand Lsd, confusingly, does contain the 's' that comes from solidus but I suspect that's retro-engineered as part of the British attempt to be seen as the 'Nova Roma' from 1700 onwards.
More info: https://www.etymonline.com/word/shilling
@jake
I was told nearly 60 years ago at school, that the confusion with the pound weight (lb) and the pound currency (£) may be because they go back to a similar ancient derivations. The old Roman pound ("libra" roughly about 11-12 ounces) and the Saxon coinage of the old penny, a silver coin - 240 of which were made from a pound weight of silver. The shilling (derived from the Roman solidus gold coin weighing 1/72 of a pound) was equivalent to 12 silver pennies. There were 20 shillings in the £ so 12x20=240 is easily divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, etc. The penny was divided into smaller coins: 2 ha’pennies (half pennys) and 4 farthings (“fourth things”) so there were 960 of the smallest coins to the £ allowing a wide range of quantities to be costed.
Incidentally that is why small/inexpensive things were sold by the dozen (12) because 12 items at, say, 3 pennies each would cost 3 shillings, and as 12 is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. The seller and the buyer would know that 12 inexpensive items at a farthing each would be 3 pennies etc...
> Incidentally that is why small/inexpensive things were sold by the dozen
And thus the reason why in the UK eggs are sold in multiples of 6 all the way up to the 12x12 wholesale trays.
Although I think I heard somewhere that the Brussels overlords wanted to start forcing UK farmers to print the weight on each box, as the concept of selling things by unit quantity was beyond the comprehension of the bureaucrats.
I've sometimes heard the hash referred to as a waffle.
And in Univac-speak, the ! is sometimes referred to as a bang (as in: "We ended up having to dollar-bang the 1100-80) and sometimes as a shriek (as in: "To list all lines using the pine editor type pee-shriek").
Though I have heard someone (from TSB) speak of "Pee Bang*", I've never heard anyone say "Dollar-Shriek".
* - A term with resonance in these days of accusations of collusion and secret KGB videos.
"!" has been pronounced "bang" for centuries, it's a printer's term.
For the computer world, look up "bang path". I was stanford!sail!jake in the late '70s and early '80s. (The bang path is mostly correct, but I've changed the name to protect the guilty as I should be archived at DejaGoo, if the gootards ever fix it :-)
Then there is the "#!" interpreter directive ... Naming it back in the day was a trifle problematic ... "hashbang" was a no-go during the 70s; sounded too much like hashbong & the various neckbearded hippies[1] who were busy (re)inventing UNIX/BSD were paranoid ... octothorpe-bang is clumsy, and pound-bang is just plain weird ... So almost by default, it became "sharp-bang" which was modified to sh-bang (from /bin/sh), and pronounced & later written shebang.
[1]They say that if you remember the SF Bay Area during the 60s & 70s, you didn't live there, but I'm here to tell you that some of us were smart enough to not get into pot ;-)
The ! path separator was adopted by UUCP mail in the UNIX world, and remnants of it still persist in the canned sendmail configurations shipped with real UNIX systems.
I used to be att!ihnp4!hvmpa!gatherp within the AT&T name space (I've googled this, so I don't think it's leaking any info).
ihnp4 used to be a very good machine to use to base mail path addresses, because it seemed to be connected to everything, and I was surprised to find a reference to an ihnp4 based ! mailpath in a document about 10 years ago. I think the name has finally gone now, but the name persisted with new systems adopting the name as hardware was retired.
"ih" stood for Indian Hill, an AT&T development lab in Chicago where AT&Ts switching systems (telephone exchanges) were developed, amongst other things. "np" stood for network processor, and 4 was the number of the system.
It was quite interesting, as because of the way that the ! separator specified a mail path, you could explicitly route mails through various systems to check connectivity. I frequently used to generate a mail loop back to myself, bouncing a mail of a distant server to check that a particular route worked.
It's not that long ago (well, actually ~20 years - but that does not seem that long to me) that you were able to use ! mail routing with sendmail (with a normal rule-set) on TCP/IP networks, but as sendmail get replaced and explicit mail routing fell out of favor, it stopped working.
I still use UUCP to route stuff internally, including in my (smallish) news farm. Makes a lot of sense, for a lot of reasons.
My eldest Niece reports that comp-sci students at her Uni implemented a "students only" UUCP network over the existing school network a couple years ago. It's mostly used for email, small file transfer, and a private Usenet hierarchy. Seems the thirty-somethings who are supposedly the administrators never learned UUCP and have no idea that what they are doing even exists. No, I'm not naming the Uni ... but apparently they are connected to other schools, world-wide, and the PTB are none the wiser. To get around draconian filters, they even have a couple links that are dial-up, over POTS, if you can believe it. Good for them! :-)
ihnp4 was very good. Stanford was, too, as was ucb, for obvious reasons ... but I'd be rather leery of posting a real address here, even a very old one, which is why I munge mine. The gookids in charge of the DejaNews archive might eventually figure out how to properly put it back online. Unless they have completely fucked it up, which wouldn't surprise me. Seems that the concept of text-only is beyond their marketing addled brains.
"nor why buying stuff by the dozen had ever become a thing."
That bit is obvious. Everyone knows thing are cheaper by the dozen.
As for the coinage, the US, when it was the colonies and not the US, also used £SD currency. The $ had to be invented. Canada was still using a £SD system until 1858.
"some northern dialects have used 'dollar' for 'pound' for a long, long time"
When I were a lad in t' Dales, we called a crown (5/-) a dollar. Or, more usual, a half-crown (2/6) was half a dollar (and the cost of a Pint when I first got to Yorkshire). Later, I remember Reg Smythe's Andy Capp calling 50p a dollar. Now it's a pound. Must be inflation.
Was one pound and one shilling. The value of golden coins of face value one guinea is a different matter.
When I were a lad all fancy-shmancy services like private doctors and dentists, and furniture bought on hire purchase were all priced in guineas. Working class stuffwas priced in BSQ*.
* - Bog Standard Quids.
As all primary school children learned, three (old) pennies weigh an ounce. A pound's worth of old pennies (240) therefore weighs 80 ounces or 5 pounds (lbs). Which explains why in my first week of Christmas post work in 1963, two of us were sent to collect a basket containing £10 in old pennies.
"Someone needs to get control of the octothorpes!"
So that would be Ian Thorpe the well known Aussie swimmer, Billy Thorpe the well known Aussie rock star, and six other people called Thorpe? I suppose that technically our head of state is the Queen of England, so the UK already has control of us Aussies?
I agree with Dwarf here... it's not a hashtag. A hashtag by definition is a word *prefaced* by the hash/pound sign, #. Don't be mixin' your terminology here, you hear?
Easiest way to distinguish between the English pound (£) and the American pound (#) is to call the one the Sterling sign (which the £ is after all... the Pound Sterling, thank you very much!)
Much easier than 'octothorpe' ;-)
You oculd call it the sterling sign, but you will upset users of the following currencies:
Guernsey pound
Saint Helena pound
Egyptian pound
Falkland Islands pound
Gibraltar pound
Manx pound
South Sudanese pound
Syrian pound (uses £S, but close enough)
"Incidentally, since we call it a hash in the UK, but the Americans call it a pound and the social media companies are US based, why don't they call it a poundtag ?"
I was wondering why it's not called a dollartag in the U.K.
Similar to how we drive on the parkway and park on the driveway.
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That usage in the US has gone away decades ago. It was current when typewriters were a thing and was used then, but since computers came around, nobody abbreviates pound as #.
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On the contrary, it's used all the time, both as an abbreviation for pound, and even more so, as an abbreviation for number, as in #6 shot... which gets swapped for #4 shot if you move to steel.
Having lived in the US for a few years (in various places) but being a brit ... so i noticed these things... The 'nobody calls it a pound sign' is VERY strongly regional and/or local.
Some places assume if you say pound sign you mean Lb, and call # 'a number sign', others almost exclusively use it as a weight identifier " #potatoes 39c " isn't a weird hashtag, it's telling you the tubers are cheap
Yep. I once did a test upgrade onto a VM of some software and told some of our scientists to give it a quick test to make sure the upgrade didn't break anything before I upgraded the productive server. As it was only a test I'd created an iSCSI LUN for the user files (obviously I didn't setup backups as it was a test). Once we'd shown that the new version didn't break anything, I upgraded the system and then blew away the VM and associated LUN. I then got an email from a scientist who'd ignored the fact that it was only a test system for an upgrade and had done real work on it and now didn't have any of the data. I did try to get it back, but even the storage vendor couldn't help.
Scientists, not as good at following instructions as you think -->
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