4 ms·
Some of what's written here is not quite right. ASCII was developed in cooperation with ISO, ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer's Association), and BSI (Briti
by kps 9y ago
Some of what's written here is not quite right. ASCII was developed in cooperation with ISO, ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer's Association), and BSI (British Standards Institute), and CCITT (International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee), and it was clear from the start that there would be national/linguistic versions — this was the origin of ‘code pages’, to use the IBMism.
ISO 2022 / ECMA 35 had defined the means of designating character sets (both 7-bit and 8-bit) by 1971, a decade before the IBM PC chose to ignore the standard.
- dfox 9y agoIn fact, original version of ASCII even left some of the codes under 128 undefined or available for local redefinitions. This is why Smalltalk uses _ for assignment (it was left arrow on Alto) and why some still used encodings have local currency symbol (eg. ¥) in place of \.
- kps 9y agoAlong with leaving codes 96–123 undefined, and significant differences in control codes, 1963 ASCII had ← and ↑ in the positions used for _ and ^ in 1967.
- bitwize 9y agoISTR that a previous version of ASCII standardized the back-arrow in the underscore space. The same with up-arrow in place of caret, which is why the caret is used as an exponentiation operator in e.g., BASIC.