Ever wondered why there is a ‘|’ symbol on your keyboard? I have, and I finally found out how it got there a few days ago.
(slightly edited)
The SHARE IBM users' group opposed the adoption of ASCII-1967 because the vertical bar, which is the PL/I logical OR operator, appears in a section of the code reserved for "national use" characters, and, moreover, in the lower case section of the code which might not be supported by all devices.
SHARE insisted that there be a vertical bar in the uppercase, international section of the code, so the X3.2 subcommittee made it acceptable to substitute a vertical bar symbol for the exclamation point, and broke the character that was supposed to be a vertical bar in half so it could not be mistaken for a logical OR symbol. The damage was repaired in ASCII-1977, but by this time large numbers of devices were using the broken-bar symbol and the transition back to the real, solid, international, vertical bar is still not complete.