The key that ASCII deleted

A small casualty of computing history, the cent sign once had its own typewriter key, sitting comfortably beside the numbers, because writing prices in cents was everyday work. Then ASCII — the character set that shaped early computer keyboards in the 1960s — simply left it out. With no place in that foundational standard, the cent sign quietly fell off keyboards and never climbed back on, which is why to this day there's no obvious key for a symbol that was once routine.

Its form is straightforward: a lowercase c with a stroke through it, marking one-hundredth of a larger unit. Conventionally it follows the number rather than preceding it the way the dollar sign does — 50¢, not ¢50.

The practical upshot is that people now avoid it. Prices under a dollar get written "$0.50" or "50 cents" because those are easy to type, and the dedicated symbol survives mostly in older print and in places that kept it out of habit. It's a neat illustration of how a technical decision — what fit in a 1960s character table — can reshape an everyday writing convention decades later, long after the constraint itself has fallen away.