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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I always hated the Windows product key font which you'd have to type in to register Windows. The B looked like 8 and the D looked like O.

I'd have to break out a magnifying glass to figure it out.

That font seems to be popular for serial numbers and any other use case where the user has to type in a series of characters.

I call it the IH8USRS font.

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It's interesting that codes for the Nintendo eShop have certain similar looking characters blocked off even in the keyboard you use to input. That way there's no question even if it's a zero or the letter O for example.

The Windows product keys are encoded in base24 using the alphabet BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789, no doubt chosen to avoid ambiguities (e.g. 5 and S, 1 and I, O and 0), but unfortunately the B and 8 confusion remains.

Too bad this was not written near the keys.

Or, well, I don't know if it would be very useful to write there either. At least not on that font.

Interesting. I've not thought about this before, but it seems at first glance a rather inconsistent set.

Resolved by removing both: O and 0; I and 1 and L (l); S and 5.

Resolved by removing the letter: Z and 2; A and 4.

Not resolved: B and 8; G and 6.

I wonder if it was just a quick idea someone had, or if there is some research behind it.

Why did they remove E? Can't easily be confused with 3, I think.

Maybe they removed the vowels so that a randomly generated key doesn’t have any unexpected words in it?

Thanks for the neologism! Regardless of which font it is rendered in, it is clear from the context that the third character is the number 8 and not the letter B.

I saw a custom license plate a few months ago that was A8C0EF6 which, if not reading carefully, looked just like ABCDEFG

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