For your weekend pleasure, please press "#" and dial:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr98/cs111/labs/WWWsearch/6.html
See question 6.
Neatly balanced by:
http://ww1.comteck.com/~revenger/new1.html
(which also gives the definitions of "lemniscate" and "epizootic", among other great words)
"Octothorpe" clearly strikes a resonant chord in many people, since it makes it
onto so many people's strange trivia lists.
For a comprehensive collection of IT jargon, see:
http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/~ingvar/jargon
(This one is fun reading, and is replicated in many places on the web. See the
"ASCII" entry for "octothorpe".)
And
http://psci.sas.upenn.edu/HELP/unix/unix-faq/Unix-Questions.part2
Where we also find that
'=' is a quadrathorpe (half an octothorpe)
'-' is a bithorpe (half a quadrathorpe)
For "The Answer" about the source of "octothorpe", see Ralph Carlsen's
1995/11/28 letter in the Telecom Digest (summary of comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup):
http://massis.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives
and do a search there for "octothorpe".
! dammit
% mail unicode@unicode.org < octothorpe.junkmail
--Ken
% --Ken: Command not found ;-)
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