On 8/1/2015 11:12 PM, clipka wrote:
> Am 15.07.2015 um 14:48 schrieb scott:
>>> Or the "Pound" symbol as it is called in America. (Shift+3 on American
>>> keyboards.)
>>
>> Now that's confusing. What about hashtags, do they have poundtags?
>
> My suspicion is that this terminology is a relic of early information
> technology, when 7-bit character encoding was still the norm. In the US
> this of course meant ASCII, but in other countries slight variations
> thereof were standardized, replacing less-commonly used characters with
> local special characters.
>
> One such character code mapped to a non-ASCII character by some national
> standards was decimal 35 (0x23). While the ASCII character set maps this
> code to the hash character ("#"), the corresponding UK 7-bit character
> encoding standard (BS 4730) repurposed this code for - ta-da! - the
> pound sterling character ("£").
>
> American computer users were certainly blissfully unaware of this fact,
> and also possibly blissfully unaware of the proper term for their "#"
> sign; so when in newsgroups or on other computer-based discussion
> platforms they would see Brits use a character that on their terminals
> showed up as "#", and see the Brits call it the "pound character", they
> might have been quick to adopt that name for the hash.


That sounds right to me (2015).

When I used to work for a living. It was fun working on a machine that 
had lost its CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
The keyboard would revert to US settings but the letters didn't. ;-)
Remembering where the  backslash, at sign and inverted comma keys were, 
was a pain.

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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