GOST 10859

GOST 10859 (1964) is a standard of the Soviet Union which defined how to encode data on punched cards.

This standard allowed a variable word size, depending on the type of data being encoded, but only uppercase characters.

These include the non-ASCII “decimal exponent symbol” ⏨.

It was used to express real numbers in scientific notation.

The ⏨ character was also part of the ALGOL programming language specifications and was incorporated into the then German character encoding standard ALCOR.