I believe that the word “octotherp” was coined by an engineering colleague and I early in 1964 as part of a Bell System project to develop the touchtone telephone as a data input device. We had never heard the word before we began using it. I am trying to find some Bell System documentation to verify the events described below and identify the people involved.

From January 1963 to June 1965 I was assigned to the Data Communication Planning Department of AT&T Marketing in New York. In the summer of 1963 I was given the assignment to help develop a way to use the touchtone telephone as a means of communicating with a computer. I was to work with a colleague in the AT&T Engineering Department of AT&T.

At that time telephones had only ten buttons so we had Bell Telephone Laboratory engineers produce several telephones with twelve buttons. The two additional buttons were to be used as data control characters. We labeled the buttons with a star and a diamond. The engineers developed a way to use the telephone to call a modem-equipped keypunch machine to punch out cards to be used as input to a computer.

It all worked very well so we decided to demonstrate the system at the American Bankers Association convention in Miami Beach that was to be held in the fall of 1963. A representative from the AT&T Public Relations Department was assigned to help us with the introduction.

We arranged to get a booth at the convention for the exhibit. To help us in the booth we arranged to have the local District Manager and several girls from the Customer Service Department of Southern Bell work with us. Their job was to get the bankers to come into the booth so they could demonstrate the system for them. They did a great job and the exhibit was the hit of the convention. We had hundreds of visitors come into the booth so that at one point the manager of the exhibition told us we had to stop blocking the aisle in front of the booth.

After the successful introduction, my engineer colleague and I were told to develop a proposal to have Western Electric manufacture all Touchtone telephones from then with twelve buttons. We finally got Bell System approval for the change. One of the problems that popped up, however, was that since the star and diamond symbols didn’t appear on typewriter keyboards, writing instructions, advertising, etc. would be difficult. As a result we had to come up with different symbols. The asterisk and the pound or number sign were chosen to replace the star and the diamond.

One problem with that, however, was that we didn’t know the real name of the “#” sign. I called every almost computer, typewriter, and adding machine company in the U.S. and there was no universal name. It was just called either the “pound” sign or the “number” sign. The British called it a “hash” mark. We thought there should be a better name than those.

To solve the problem, we did some brainstorming at lunch one day in early 1964.We decided in a jocular way to call the pound sign an “Octotherp”. That was because it had eight points and the ending of “therp” sounded Greek and seemed to go with the “octo”.

We tried to get “octotherp” officially adopted as the name of the character but many people at Western Electric and the Bell Laboratories objected to it. As a result the pound sign and number sign were left as the common names and octotherp went into the dustbin of history.

I can be reached at [email protected] for comments

Much later on in the “First and second quarters 1999” issue of the AT&T retirees’ publication “encore”, Sheldon Hockheiser wrote an article about the development of the Touchtone telephone and the controversy over the name of the # character.