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The 4-bit columns were actually meaningful in the design of ASCII. The original influence was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal https://en.wiki
by kps 10y ago
The 4-bit columns were actually meaningful in the design of ASCII. The original influence was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal and one of the major design choices involved which column should contain the decimal digits. ASCII was very carefully designed; essentially no character has its code by accident. Everything had a reason, although some of those reasons are long obsolete. For instance, '9' is followed by ':' and ';' because those two were considered the most expendable for base-12 numeric processing, where they could be substitued by '10' and '11' characters. (Why base 12? Shillings.)
The original 1963 version of ASCII covers some of this; a scan is available online. See also The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968 by Eric Fischer, also easily found.
- soneil 10y agoThat Fischer paper does look interesting - Thanks! I do understand that I've probably simplified "how I understand it" vs "how/why it was designed that way". This is pretty much intentional - I try to find patterns to things to help me remember them, rather than to explain any intent.
- kps 10y agoYeah, there's not much 4-bit-ness that's an aid to understanding what it is today. One is that NUL, space, and '0' all have the low 4 bits zero because they're all in some sense ‘nothing’.
- 13of40 10y agoI stumbled across the history of the ASCII "delete" character recently: It's character 127, which means it's 1111111 in binary. On paper tape, that translates into 7 holes, meaning any other character can be "deleted" on the tape by punching out its remaining holes. (It's also the only non-control ASCII character that can't be typed on an English keyboard, so it's good for creating WIFi passwords that your kid can't trivially steal.)
- jacobush 10y agoWow, I never knew it was an actual character.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- raldi 10y agoSure, think of it this way: you're sitting at a terminal connected to a mainframe and press the "X" key; what bits get sent over the wire? The ones corresponding to that letter on the ASCII chart. Now replace "X" with "Delete".
- JdeBP 10y ago> It's also the only non-control ASCII character that can't be typed on an English keyboard Don't count on it. There's a fairly long standing convention in some countries with some keyboard layouts that Control+Backspace is DEL. This is the case for Microsoft Windows' UK Extended layout, for example. [C:\]inkey Press Control+Backspace %%i & echo %@ascii[%i] Press Control+Backspace⌂ 127 [C:\] This is also the case for the UK keyboard maps on FreeBSD/TrueOS. (For syscons/vt at least. X11 is a different ballgame, and the nosh user-space virtual terminal subsystem has the DEC VT programmable backspace key mechanism.)
- SeriousM 10y agoIt's actually easier to add two spaces at both ends of the password :)
- kps 10y ago(too late for me to edit; took me a while to find online) Another good source on the design of ASCII is Inside ASCII by Bob Bemer, one of the committee members, in three parts in Interface Age May through July 1978. https://archive.org/details/197805InterfaceAgeV03I05 https://archive.org/details/197805InterfaceAgeV03I05 https://archive.org/details/197806InterfaceAgeV03I06 https://archive.org/details/197806InterfaceAgeV03I06 https://archive.org/details/197807InterfaceAgeV03I07 https://archive.org/details/197807InterfaceAgeV03I07