| abstract | - Then video terminals were invented, and slash got more efficient. Most of the time spent on video terminals was to create graphics. Although much more efficient than doing so on a typewriter, it was not efficient. The American National Standards Institute came to the rescue. After two years of deliberations, it decided that what was missing was a slash in the opposite direction (the backslash); also a vertical bar. Now the artist had everything he needed to create high-quality low-quality graphics (except the graphics). Shortly after, Bill Gates gave up his pastime of hacking to become a legitimate software writer. But his penchant for pranks lived on as his MS-DOS used the backslash instead of the slash. "Just to be different." (He would go on to put clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades in the character set, ensuring that the personal computer would be able to perform any relevant use.) The rest of the computer industry, meanwhile, sensibly used the regular slash, just as it sensibly counted everything starting at 0. Writing software that converts slash to backslash and back again drives the modern American economy, and accounts for salaries equal to the entire gross domestic product of the state of Louisiana.
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