Typographical question to the fedi. Friend of mine was commenting that the origins of the backslash character are unclear. It was included in the teletype character set and IBM put it on ASCII for that reason but it is not known what it was for. Searching around I found some unreliable info that it was used in typography from the 16th century in order to represent line or paragraph breaks. Can anyone confirm or disconfirm, preferably with source? Boosts welcome.
@modulux I'm massively, massively behind the curve here, but I wanted to thank you for this thought-provoking post. I was inspired to write a few words on the history of the '\' at my blog: https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2025/03/backing-the-backslash/.
@shadychars @modulux hah, I missed the original post. Very interesting. It's a shame that the backslash was not introduced due to its flexibility for graphics :D