It popped my mind that in the past I recall it was rendered as a two small pipes / a stretched colon.

When I was young I had an MSX, and my memory was right, ascii character 0x7C / 124 looks different. See https://www.msx.org/wiki/images/6/66/MSX_font-Int.png

Looking further, on https://www.ascii-code.com/ ,I can see that 124 / 0x7C is the "vertical bar". And 166 / 0xA6 is "Pipe, Broken vertical bar"

It seems we're not using a pipe.. Does anybody happen to know why?