Whats this and whats it for?

[KevinD]

Whats this thing in the upper left of the keyboard under the escape key? ~ <- That thing...

 

[alevin]

It means "approximately".

 

[CountryBoy]

or the tilde symbol and some folks use it for approximation since most keyboards don't have the double tilde sign, one over top of the other.

 

[Frixxxx]

The tilde has been used in mathematics for years.

"~" actually got really famous when Windows 95 came about. Since the DOS naming convention for files were limited to 8dot3 or 8 characters for the filename and 3 characters for the extension.

Windows extended this to 255 characters.

But, to allow DOS programs to readily see these names the windows files which looked lik "Program Files" had to be avaailable to DOS, so it became "Program~1".

 

[KevinD]

Thanks!

 

[Buster]

This is what it should look like..