3 ms·
Sounds like a missed opportunity. ASCII maybe could have had BLL, BLM, BLH (low, medium, high) with different frequencies and you could have encoded something i
by mbar84 6y ago
Sounds like a missed opportunity. ASCII maybe could have had BLL, BLM, BLH (low, medium, high) with different frequencies and you could have encoded something in those bells instead of having to count a sequence.
- gumby 6y agoIf you actually look at the ascii chart broken out by bitfield you’ll see that the codes and key tops reflect a tight mapping (remember old teletypes were electromechanical: an electric motor drove the platen but all the keystroke decoding was mechanical. The usual ascii chart (e.g. man ascii) obscures this by using hex or decimal codes.) So they had a block of 31 control character (forget null, and delete obviously wasn’t in there because of paper tape). Many of those control characters were and are useful (^s for stop, ^r for resume) much of the space was empty and so randomly assigned. There would have been room for more bell characters, but that wasn’t really the mentality of the day.
- 082349872349872 6y agoInstead of bells we got FS, GS, RS, and US. But come to think of it, ASCII was (ca. 1960) firmly based in the cards + operator days.
- alblue 6y agoI put together a nice diagram of this in my “history of Unicode” talk. The specific slide is at: https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/a-brief-history-of-unicode?slide=6 https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/a-brief-history-of-unicode?sl... There’s link to the video recording in the comments if you’re interested.