On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 22:42:27 +0100, Graeme Wall wrote

Yes, but you appear to have forgotten the convention for writing the
amounts down. It would be either "1s 3d" or "1/3". If one of your
prices
had been 1s 4d, then the way you wrote them would have indicated a
farthing.

Thought it would also have been set off as 1' 3".

That's one foot three inches.

Indeed it is, but I believe that such quotation marks are used for other
things as well.

As someone else has pointed out, for angles, but not, in my experience, for
monetary values. Remember the default was 3 values, pounds, shilling and
pence, the use of ' and " wouldn't allow that.

I was also around during the pre-decimal era and only ever remember seeing
£SD written as 3s 6d or 3/6

In message k
Stimpy wrote:

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 22:42:27 +0100, Graeme Wall wrote

Yes, but you appear to have forgotten the convention for writing the
amounts down. It would be either "1s 3d" or "1/3". If one of your
prices
had been 1s 4d, then the way you wrote them would have indicated a
farthing.

Thought it would also have been set off as 1' 3".

That's one foot three inches.

Indeed it is, but I believe that such quotation marks are used for
other things as well.

As someone else has pointed out, for angles, but not, in my experience,
for monetary values. Remember the default was 3 values, pounds, shilling
and pence, the use of ' and " wouldn't allow that.

I was also around during the pre-decimal era and only ever remember seeing
£SD written as 3s 6d or 3/6



3/6d had a certain vogue in shops that traditionally had a creative way with
apostrophe's.

--
Graeme Wall
This address is not read, substitute trains for rail.
Transport Miscellany at http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail/index.html

Stephen Sprunk writes:
AFAIK, all TVMs in the US and Canada will accept $20 bills. The problem
with doing that is the change you get ...

In Toronto you can buy a single token (for the equivalent of a cash
fare, $2.75) from a vending machine, but you have to pay in coins, so
change is not an issue. (I'm not sure whether they give change from a
$3 or $4 payment -- I never pay single fares and it never occurred to
me to think about it until now. When the present machines were brought
into use, the cash fare was $2, so this was not an issue.)

The machines do take $20 bills, but what you get out is 8 tokens and
$2 in change. Similarly, a $10 bill gives you 4 tokens and $1. The
effective rate of $2.25 is equivalent to the 5 tokens for $11.25 that
you can buy in a store or from a human subway-station fare collector.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto "The walls have hearsay."
-- Fonseca & Carolino

Graeme Wall wrote:

As someone else has pointed out, for angles, but not, in my experience, for
monetary values. Remember the default was 3 values, pounds, shilling and
pence, the use of ' and " wouldn't allow that.

I suppose it could, if ° was the sign for a pound (which of course it
isn't) as used for degrees/minutes/seconds.

Peter Beale

Stimpy wrote:

I was also around during the pre-decimal era and only ever remember seeing
£SD written as 3s 6d or 3/6

But when you got into the pounds there were more possibilities: £1/3/6,
£1 3s 6d,
£1-3-6, £1:3:6 etc. (also 23/6 from time to time, not least on railway
tickets - in the new issue of RM there is a picture of a ticket for the
"15 guinea special", with the price shown as "315s."(.

Peter Beale

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008 10:34:05 +0100, Peter Beale wrote
Stimpy wrote:

I was also around during the pre-decimal era and only ever remember seeing
£SD written as 3s 6d or 3/6

But when you got into the pounds there were more possibilities: £1/3/6,
£1 3s 6d, £1-3-6, £1:3:6 etc.

Indeed... that's why I didn't go there :-)

Neil Williams wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:51:50 +0100, Martin Rich
wrote:

I doubt many people in Britain still use cheques to pay their credit
card bills, in preference to instructing bill payments by phone or
Internet.

I can't see cheques in the UK lasting another 10 years at all, to be
honest. In the US, though, my understanding is that many people still
get paid by cheque, which in the UK is almost completely unknown -
direct bank transfer is the usual.

In the US, it takes a couple pay cycles to get direct deposit set up,
though most white-collar workers do it immediately upon changing jobs.
It's not as common in service-industry or blue-collar jobs, where folks
may even be paid in cash each week or even each day; that appears to be
mainly a cultural thing, though the banks are trying their best to
change that by offering "free" accounts only to people with direct
deposit. Still, many folks resist that, for reasons I've never
understood myself. Also, many smaller employers simply don't offer it
because their banks charge extra fees for the service (in addition to
setup fees to use it at all), whereas checks are free.

S

Dik T. Winter wrote:
In article (Neil Williams) writes:
On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:51:50 +0100, Martin Rich
wrote:
I doubt many people in Britain still use cheques to pay their credit
card bills, in preference to instructing bill payments by phone or
Internet.

I can't see cheques in the UK lasting another 10 years at all, to be
honest. In the US, though, my understanding is that many people still
get paid by cheque, which in the UK is almost completely unknown -
direct bank transfer is the usual.

I can't remember ever having seen a cheque used in the Netherlands. But
I know that cashing them can be a problem, so much so that cashing a
cheque that I received for a refund from the US would cost me more than
its value.

Cashing checks can be expensive in the US as well; the normal solution
is to deposit it in your own account because that's free. If you don't
have an account, you have to go to the issuing bank and pay a small fee
or (if it's a payroll check) go to a check-cashing store and pay a large
fee (only logical if the check is from a bank that's not local or not
open when you need the money).

Checks are, unfortunately, something you have to deal with in the US.
They're the default method of payment for nearly everything (except,
lately, for small to medium retail purchases), though more and more
places are starting to accept debit cards. Many non-retail transactions
simply can't be done with plastic, though that's gradually changing, and
the ones that can often have a "convenience fee" for using a credit or
debit card. Also, as noted, many debit cards have daily limits that
make using them to pay some things impossible. That leaves credit
cards, but that opens a whole 'nother can of worms, and assumes the
person has good enough credit to get one (and it isn't maxed out, as
many people's are).

S

In article ,
Graeme Wall wrote:
In message
wrote:

"Chris Tolley" wrote in message
...

Yes, but you appear to have forgotten the convention for writing the
amounts down. It would be either "1s 3d" or "1/3". If one of your

Thought it would also have been set off as 1' 3".

As someone else has pointed out, for angles, but not, in my experience, for
monetary values. Remember the default was 3 values, pounds, shilling and
pence, the use of ' and " wouldn't allow that.

Though admittedly I was only 12 on D-Day, I don't remember ever seeing
or learning the 1'3" format Hounslow3 mentions. I'm certain that " was
never used for pence. On greengrocers' signs prices might have been
shown as 1'3 per lb, for instance, but the triangular apostrophe-like
thing was really a stylised form of the diagonal stroke (solidus I think
it's called ?) in 1/3.

On the other hand as far as I recall, prices like 1/3d were not uncommon
in shop windows, even though not technically correct.

Nick
--
Serendipity: http://www.leverton.org/blosxom (last update 6th June 2008)
"The Internet, a sort of ersatz counterfeit of real life"
-- Janet Street-Porter, BBC2, 19th March 1996

Stephen Sprunk schrieb:


In the US, it takes a couple pay cycles to get direct deposit set up,
though most white-collar workers do it immediately upon changing jobs.
It's not as common in service-industry or blue-collar jobs, where folks
may even be paid in cash each week or even each day; that appears to be
mainly a cultural thing, though the banks are trying their best to
change that by offering "free" accounts only to people with direct
deposit. Still, many folks resist that, for reasons I've never
understood myself.

They probably fear, that the administrative effort for some extra would
be too high for the employer.

In blue collar jobs paid weekly over the table, it is custom in many
companies, that some extra bills go over the table in case of some extra
effort. I don't think, that anybody pays taxes on it, and in fact, the
bookkeeping costs for this might get higher as the sums involved.

That would also be the time, to cash in the small sums, which you might
have spent buying other people's help during the week. On construction
sites, that happens more often than you might think.


Hans-Joachim


--
San Joaquin Daylight, Tehachapi Loop, 1971

http://www.railpictures.net/images/d...1189371600.jpg