Re: Standard codes (out of topic !?)

Neil Franklin wrote:

> "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).

Was this the 1st ASCII-alike 7-bit code, to your knowledge? (meaning:
were the 0's and 1's arranged in the same order in US/AT&T as in ASCII?)

TMK (at least in the early days) teletypes used 5-bit Baudot-code,
"bracking" each sign with an independent start- and stop-element, thus
using 7 bits rather bluntly. And not being able to transmit a lowercase
char, cos' of being Baudot...

> > 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.

Which 1 of these acronyms resides in Geneva?

> > 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).

Just pondering: "Telegraph was 5-bit, teletype went 7-bit, computers
called for 8-bit." Does this make any sense?

> > 1986 ISO 8859-1, called Latin-1
> > - it becomes international standard

AFAIK the purpose of ISO 8859 was to put non-Americanenglish chars in
the #128-#255 range (there was no room for weird european a's, o's and
u's in #0-#127). That's why American, English, Dutch, etc. keyboards
deal with Latin-1,.. and German, Hungarian, (Taiwanese??!) keyboards,
for example, are connected to a different ISO 8859(-?) character set.
All founded on ASCII, though.

> > - 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).

Not random. On purpose! The ISO-committee that dealt with the problem of
language-specific chars in 1986 didn't (and couldn't) foresee that nowadays
those exotic tribes gather on the Usenet and W3 (and try to communicate in
some sort of a 7-bit slang).

> > (it exists no code   called ANSI !)

ANSI X3.4?

> 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.

True, they don't know what they're talking about, but they provide good cracks.

> > 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.


Amen


--
where's the art?

Related ASCII art in the Gallery

Explore these categories from our collection of 11,000+ artworks:

  , _ ,
 ( o o )
/'` ' `'\
|'''''''|
|\\'''//|
   """

 ,~~--~~-.
+      | |\
|| |~ |`,/-\
*\_) \_) `-'

 __
 \  \     _ _
  \**\ ___\/ \
X*#####*+^^\_\
  o/\  \
     \__\

.------------.
|\\//\\//\\//|
|//\\//\\//\\|
|\\//\\//\\//|
|//\\//\\//\\|
'------------'

   _______
 /` _____ `\;,
/__(^===^)__\';,
  /  :::  \   ,;
 |   :::   | ,;'
 '._______.'`jgs

 _  _
(o)(o)--.
 \../ (  )hjw
 m\/m--m'`--.

Make your own ASCII art

Turn images, text or 3D into ASCII, or draw your own – right in your browser.