This is also why the Teletype layout has parentheses on 8 and 9 unlike modem keyboards that have them on 9 and 0 (a layout popularised by the IBM Selectric). The original Apple IIs had this same layout, with a “bell” on top of the G.
According to the layouts on this site, there're more European layouts with parenthesis on 8, 9 than on 9, 0. (I had to zoom out to see the right-side of the comparisons.)
What happened to this block and the keyboard key arrangement?
ESC [ { 11011
FS \ | 11100
GS ] } 11101
Also curious why the keys open and close braces, but ... the single and double curly quotes don't open and close, but are stacked. Seems nuts every time I type Option-{ and Option-Shift-{ …
You're no longer talking about ASCII. ASCII has only a double quote, apostrophe (which doubles as a single quote) and backtick/backquote.
Note on your Mac that the Option-{ and Option-}, with and without Shift, produce quotes which are all distinct from the characters produced by your '/" key! They are Unicode characters not in ASCII.
The apostrophe is shown as a closing quote, by slanting to the right; approximately a mirror image of the backtick. So it looks as though those two are intended to form an opening and closing pair. Except, in many terminal fonts, the apostrophe is a just vertical tick, like half of a double quote.
The ' being veritcal helps programming language '...' literals not look weird.
