Another oldtimer here. I did my first programming in 1967 on an IBM 1620 in both assembler and Fortran II. I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP-11 RSTS system in the mid 70's. I pronounced A$ as either "A-dollar" or "A-string". In my circle, the two were used interchangeably. I'm in the USA, by the way. Ken

Back in the mid-70's I had a friend who did a lot of work with machine code on DEC minicomputers. One day he used his lunch break to go to the bank to straighten out a problem he had been having with his checking account. It turns out that he had been trying to balance his checkbook in octal.