Re: Standard codes (out of topic !?)

"Meph" <UZS...@uni-bonn.de> writes:
>
> 1963 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
> - specified as 7-bit code for telecommunication and data exchange
> - 100 of 128 positions are used (only upper case)

Prepend this with: U.S./AT&T Teletype code. Existant at least in 1953
(I have used a device built then). Had 64 printable characters (codes
32-95) identical with todays ASCII with a few substitution (no. 95 (_)
was then a leftwards facing arrow, no. 94 (^) was an actual upwards
facing arrow, possibly others I do not know of).


> 1965 ECMA-6 (European National Standards Institute, Genf)

European Computer Manufacturers Association, actually.

ENSI does not exist, there exists an ETSI European Telecommunications
Standards Institute you may be confusing this with.


> 1981 IBM Codepage 437
> - IBM uses the 8 bit and extended the code to 256 positions

8 bit, but neither a predecessor to ISO-8859 (that is why DOS texts
make such a mess on Usenet), nor the first 8bit code. The honour of
both of those goes AFAIK to an DEC character set from the mid/late
1970s (VT52 or VT100 terminal character set).


> 1986 ISO 8859-1, called Latin-1
> - it becomes international standard
> - identically with IBM Codepage 819 and  850

More likely those IBM Codepages are the names of their ISO implementations.


> - used in Windows with some additional characters

Particulartly 128-159, which are empty in ISO, but also quite a few
other random changes that foul up 8bit exchanges (that is why Windows
texts make such a mess on Usenet).


> (it exists no code   called ANSI !)

The name ANSI properly refers to a set of terminal control codes
(function key reporting, cursor positioning, font switsching etc)
derived from the DEC VT100 terminal code.

What is today often misscalled ANSI is the PC/MS-DOS character set,
which is actually pure IBM Codepage 437.


> 1987 Unicode (UCS)
> - developed by Apple and Xerox

Actually derived from an Xerox character set, with additions by Apple
and others.


> - at the moment only used by Windows NT and Java

And Linux (as alternative to ISO8859-1, the default).


> 1992 ISO/IEC 10646-1
> - it becomes international standard

Actually ISO10646 is a 32 bit code with Unicode as its codes 0-65535.

Also ISO10646 defines UTF-8, a coding that uses single bytes. 1 byte
for chars 0-127 (= ASCII), 2 bytes for 128-2047, 3 bytes for
2048-65535 ... until max 6 bytes.


--
Neil Franklin, nei...@franklin.ch.remove http://neil.franklin.ch/
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