Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1556

I remember that one - I saw it on a lot of calendars when I was a child.

Remember typewriters that didn't have a separate '1'? The convention was to use a lower-case L instead. Retraining typists must have been fun.

Someone deserves to roast in hell for things like that.

Another good one is the vertical bar (), which is easily confused with '1' (or 'I' for that matter). It didn't help that the keyboard on the IBM 029 keypunch put '' right next to '1', where a slightly too long stretch would get the wrong character. Even if you looked at the interpreted card it would be easy to miss the error - especially if the ribbon was worn or one of the print wires was damaged.

Unlikely? Perhaps. But I shuddered when I came across an instance of this while converting a mortgage file from one system to a newer one. (The old machine wasn't sophisticated enough to generate a data check.) I went to the customer's microfiche listing and looked closely at the field, and there it was - on file for years without anyone noticing.

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