Aunty Acid by Ged Backland for October 22, 2017

Stop beating around the bush, Aunty, and tell us with real numbers your age.

What’s a hashtag? LOL!!!

Octothorpe before it.

Me too, Aunty.

Old C coders had words for each punctuation and special characters. The octothorpe, for example was “pound” – so you need to be a really old C coder to get $$ ping !

# is one of the most versatile special characters. It is used to denote “numerous”( ☺) things, like “mate” in chess notation, and to make coding comments in some programming languages.

I thought this was the pound sign: lb

Aunty is pence wise and pound foolish.

I’m so old, I can remember the pound sign was a number sign.

Me too! I remember when all telephones had rotary dials, and the first two digits of your phone number were letters! And for those of us on a party line, there was a different ring for each number on the line. Our ring was a long and a short. Anybody on the party line could and did listen in on your conversations.

And I thought it was a sharp sign in music. ♯.

Yes, yes it is.