[asterisk-users] Cannot figure out pound key in qwerty keyboard

[A J Stiles]

On Thursday 30 Jun 2011, michael k wrote:
> All,
>
>        I am new in Asterisk. I am using asterisks with freepbx 2.7.0.10
> version. I have tried to setup voice mail by dialing *97 from my extension.
> The prerecorded system asking for a "pond key" at the end of each
> recording. But unfortunately  i am not able to locate a pound key on my
> qwerty key board. I have tried shift+3 but no luck. Please someone help me
> to figure out the pound key in my keyboard.
>
> Michael.k

By "pound key" I presume they mean a comment mark  (#),  ASCII position 35 / 
0x23.  Also known as a number sign, hash or square.

Now a boring history lesson:  In the bad old days, ASCII was a 7-bit code; and 
each country had a national variant, replacing certain obscure punctuation 
marks with accented characters and other symbols peculiar to the local 
language and culture.  In the old British ASCII variant, position 35 was 
indeed a £ sign  (a stylised cursive L with a horizontal bar, occupying 
position 163 now we are using 8 bits per character).

This seems to be the source of the confusion.  At any rate, I have never seen 
a British, American or other nationality telephone with a £ key bottom 
right -- though I have encountered many printers that produced a £ sign 
instead of a #, when given ASCII code 35.

On my machine  (British keyboard, Linux)  I can type a £ sign by pressing 
shift + 3; I can also get one by pressing Alt Gr + shift + 3.  On a Mac, 
shift + 3 and option + 3 produce £ and #, one way around or the other.  I 
don't know about Windows.

One might have naïvely expected them to choose position 36 -- the dollar sign 
in US ASCII -- for the pound sign in British ASCII; but British practice was 
to write, for example,  "No. 1" as opposed to "#1", and in any case there 
might be good reasons for wanting two currency symbols -- easier to sell 
computers to banks if they look as though they can perform conversions 
between currencies?  Also, the British variant would have been the obvious 
choice in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where the local 
currency is called the dollar and given the symbol $.

-- 
AJS

Answers come *after* questions.