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

It
looked like this: ¢

It was the dollar sign's little brother, and lived on comic books covers and in
newspaper advertisements and on pay phones and wherever anything was being
sold for less than a buck. It was a popular punctuation symbol—no question
mark, or dollar sign, certainly, but just behind the * in popularity, and I
daresay well ahead of #, &, and the now Internet-hot @. It owned an unshifted
spot on the typewriter keyboard, just to the right of the semicolon, and was
part of every third grader's working knowledge.

In the late 1990s, you don't see many cent signs. Why? Because hardly
anything costs less than a dollar anymore? Actually, the demise of the cent sign
has little to do with inflation, and everything to do with computers. And
therein 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 that
became known as ASCII ("ass-key"—The American Standard Code for Information
Interchange). This standard simply assigned a number to each of the various
symbols used in written communication (e.g., A-Z, a-z, 0-9, period, comma). A
standard 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 Data
computer. And for a Teletype terminal to work with a Digital computer, and so
on.

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

The committee decided on a seven bit code; this allowed for twice as many
characters as existing six bit standards, and permitted a parity bit on eight bit
tape. So there were 128 slots to dole out, and given the various non-
typographic computing agendas to attend to, it was inevitable that some
common symbols, including several that had always been on typewriter
keyboards, wouldn't make the cut. (The typewriter layout had certain obvious
failings in computer applications, for example: overloading the digit 1 and
lower case L, so it couldn't be blindly adopted.)
Three handy fractions were cut: ¼ ½ ¾. This makes sense, especially when
you consider that the ASCII committee was composed of engineers. I'm sure
they thought, in their engineer's way, "Why have ¼ but not 1/3? And if we
have 1/3, then why not 1/5? Or 3/32?" Similarly, the committee apparently
found $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 many
people noticed right away. The companies behind ASCII sold big, expensive
computers that were used to run businesses, and few cared that there wasn't a
cent sign character on one's new line printer. Heck, if your printer could
handle lower-case letters, you were state of the art.

But when personal computers began to appear in the late 1970s, the primary
application driving their adoption was word processing. These new small
computers used the ASCII standard—after all, that's what standards are for. By
the millions, typewriter keyboards (with ¢) were traded in for Apple IIs and IBM
PCs (without ¢). While it's true that the cent sign was ultimately made part of
other larger encoding standards, and is possible to create at modern PCs with a
little effort—the damage had been done. Without a cent key in front of them,
writers of books, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements made do
without. And over time, $0.19 began to look like the right way to say 19¢. In
another few years the cent sign will look as alien as those strange S's our
forefathers were using when they wrote the constitution.