Back in “the day”, typewriters, terminals, and printers utilized individual components to produce characters. In addition, these devices were considered “repairable” rather than disposable.
Before a repair person returned a device to the user, they usually tested to make sure all of the characters worked, and the sentence they frequently typed was something like this: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” because this sentence uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet. For some reason, I learned the long form, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890 times.”
For lots of reasons, the use of that sentence for that purpose has disappeared.
But those of you who remember will appreciate this animated gif.
To fully enjoy the experience, let it run exactly 1,234,567,890 times. According to Wolfram Alpha, that will take 143 years, 3 months, 11 days, 10 hours, 1 minute, and 17 seconds. So you might want to start soon.
When I posted this at work, Tony noted that if you curse the dog, you can pick up most of the symbols: “… the lazy !@#$%^&*()_+ dog….” Poor dog.
And if you want to read a longer posting on my personal history of technology, click here.