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Concept
Spanish peseta
Summary
The peseta (pəˈseɪtə, peˈseta) was the currency of Spain between 1868 and 2002. Along with the French franc, it was also a de facto currency used in Andorra (which had no national currency with legal tender).
The name of the currency originally comes from peceta, a Catalan diminutive form of the (Catalan) word peça (lit. piece, i.e. a coin), not from the Spanish peso (lit. weight). The word peseta has been known as early as 1737 to colloquially refer to the coin worth 2 reales provincial or of a peso. Coins denominated in "pesetas" were briefly issued in 1808 in Barcelona under French occupation; see Catalan peseta.
Traditionally, there was never a single symbol or special character for the Spanish peseta. Common abbreviations were "Pta" (plural: "Pts), "Pt", and "Ptas". A common way of representing amounts of pesetas in print was using superior letters: "Pta" and "Pts".
Common Spanish models of mechanical typewriters had the expression "Pts" on a single type head, as a shorthand intended to fill a single type space () in tables instead of three ().
Later, Spanish models of IBM electric typewriters also included the same type in its repertoire.
When the first IBM PC was designed in 1980, it included a "peseta symbol" "Pt" in the ROM of the Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) and Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) video output cards' hardware, with the code number 158. This original character set chart later became the MS-DOS code page 437. Some spreadsheet software for PC under MS-DOS, as Lotus 1-2-3, employed this character as the peseta symbol in their Spanish editions. Subsequent international MS-DOS code pages, like code page 850 and others, deprecated this character in favour of some other national characters.
In order to guarantee the interchange with previous encodings such as code page 437, the international standard Unicode includes this character as U+20A7 PESETA SIGN in its Currency Symbols block. Other than that, the use of the "peseta symbol" standalone is extremely rare, and has been outdated since the adoption of the euro in Spain.
Official source
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