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by drfuchs 1325 days ago
And typewriters, before that. They all had only a single key for Apostrophe as well as Single Left Quote and Single Right Quote. In fact, since most(?) manual typewriters also lacked a "One / Exclamation" key, there was a fourth use: for "1" you typed lower-case L (yikes); while to get an exclamation point, you had to type a period, then backspace, then overstrike with an apostrophe (which is yet another reason the apostrophe et. al. character was vertical!)