From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 January 2023):
splat
1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the
asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive
from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many
early line printers.
2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (ASCII
35).
3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a
Mac (same as alt).
4. An obsolete name used by some people for the
Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This
character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other
names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation
for "tensor product".
5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended
ASCII circle-plus character.
See also ASCII.
(1995-01-19)