ASCII Character ¦

Many early video terminals and dot-matrix printers rendered the vertical bar character as the allograph broken bar ¦. This may have been to distinguish the character from the lower-case 'L' and the upper-case 'I' on these limited-resolution devices, and to make a vertical line of them look more like a horizontal line of dashes. It was also (briefly) part of the ASCII standard. In the 1967 revision of ASCII, along with the equivalent ISO 464 code published the same year, the code point was defined to be a broken vertical bar, and the exclamation mark character was allowed to be rendered as a solid vertical bar.