The "#" key on the phone is called the "pound key" in the US and Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Names
It still is, to this day: if you call an automated system such as voicemail, you may be prompted to "press 'pound'". This is really standardized, AFAICT, and no telephone system has told me to "press hash" or "press the 'number' key" [because that's ambiguous]
cks has a history of #! but not an etymology: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ExecAndShebang...
He links to Wikipedia which documents a good history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)#History
I was trying to recall what we called it. I used SVR3, so I would've been using "#!/bin/sh" as early as 1990, and even more on SunOS 4 and other Unix servers.
I can't recall having a name for it until "hash-bang" gained currency later. We knew it was activated by the magic(5) kernel interpretations. I often called "#" as "pound" from the telephone usage, and I recall being tempted to verbalize it in C64 BASIC programming, or shell comment characters, but knowing it was not the same.
"The whole shebang" is a Civil-War-era American idiom that survived with my grandparents, so I was familiar with that meaning. And not really paying attention to Ricky Martin's discography.
Wikipedia says that Larry Wall used it in 1989. I was a fervent follower of Larry Wall in the mid-90s and Perl was my #1 scripting language. If anyone would coin and/or popularize a term like that, it's Just Another Perl Hacker,
Likewise, "bang" came from the "bang path" of UUCP email addresses, or it stood for "not" in C programming, and so "#!/bin/sh" was ambiguously nameless for me, perhaps for a decade.
Come to think of it, vi and vim have a command "!" where you can filter your text through a shell command, or "shell out" from other programs. This is the semantic that makes sense for hash-bangs, but which came first?
> "bang" came from the "bang path" of UUCP email addresses
"Bang" was in common use by computer users around 1970 when I was working at Tymshare. On the SDS/XDS Sigma 7, there was a command you could use from a Teletype to send a message to the system operator on their Teletype in the computer room. I may have this detail wrong, but I seem to recall that it included your username as a prefix, maybe like this:
What I do remember clearly is that there were also messages originated by the OS itself, and those began with "!!", which we pronounced "bang bang". Because who would ever want to say "exclamation point exclamation point"?The reason this is vivid in my mind is that I eventually found the low-level system call to let me send "system" messages myself. So I used it to prank the operator once in a while with this message:
I was proud of calling it an "undetectable" error. If it was undetectable, how did the OS detect it?