Comment by crazygringo

10 months ago

That's what I thought too. And WordStar and WordPerfect predated this character set by a couple of years, and then MultiMate and Word after.

But googling screenshots of all of them, I can't find any use of this character in their rulers. It's all dots, numbers, and bracket symbols.

So I think the end of the article is right -- it's a delta triangle that, for various reasons, got corrupted into that shape:

> If even the actual Greek uppercase delta is, quite unmistakenly, rendered as a house, then the theory that DEL is just a badly formed uppercase Greek delta character with the bottom corners cut off (due to a lack of horizontal pixels) starts to seem more and more convincing.

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crazygringo

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reddalo  10 months ago

DEL = DELta

I think this explains why they chose to put it there, instead of one of the other free spaces. It's just too smart not to do it.

  • crazygringo  10 months ago

    Yup. There are also a ton of other Greek letters in row E used in math... and no uppercase delta, which you'd obviously want, even more than many of the others. The only reason they wouldn't have included it down there was because they already included it above, exactly because it's DELta.

    It still doesn't answer why it's a short uppercase delta though... I can only guess there was a failure of communication somewhere between who chose the character set and who drew the pixels...