Stop pounding the octothorpe

Stop! Please! Stop pounding the Octothorpe...

That poor # sign at the bottom of your telephone does not deserve the disrespect it is getting. Since when did it become a "pound" sign? Perhaps it never was given the right name. But, fact is the majority of us involved in service, or engineering of the telephone know that the real name of that little sign is OCTOTHORPE. It may have been used to represent an abbreviation of pound weight. It may even have been called HASH. But, those of us in the know refuse to call it anything else.

Now history relates that the Bell Telephone system actually developed the touch tone system we now use today. The old rotary dial system was being phased out in favour of the new technology. They did the design of the touch tone dial rather abitrarily. No consideration of translation to any language was ever considered.

You will note that the dial layout sort of resembles an adding machine. Well, only a slight attempt was made to make it the same. Very few folks used adding machines at the time, so the design was chosen more for convenience than immitation.

In the early 60's engineers were looking to connect phones to computers. So, two more symbols were added. The Asterisk and Octothorpe were intended purely for future computer applications. A lot of folk don't know that there are 4 more keys that we never see. They are A, B, C, D and are located just to the right of the 12 other ones. As they were only used for control they were never carried over to the conventional telephone.

OK, back to the story... The naming of the octothorpe is rumoured to a Bell Systems supervisor named Don MacPerson. He needed to explain the keyboard, so naturally needed a destinctive name for all the keys. Ralph Carlsen in his excellent article on the subject relates that Don started naming it because of the 8 points. That derived the OCTO. "Don MacPherson at this point in his life was active in a group that was trying to get JIM THORPE's Olympic medals returned from Sweden", so he used the last name to fatten out the name so to speak.

Word spread around the labs about the name, and it was pretty well officially accepted and used in manuals for the new and subsequent phone systems. Just where the cross over to the new name happened was certainly outside the actual Bell Telephone community.

So we should be using the name it was given. After all, Don could have named it after himself. We would all be using "MacPherson" 1, 2, 3 to access services!

Let's get this gigantic error corrected! Spread the word, "stop pounding the Octothorpe"

TW