4 ms·

Not exactly. The first edition form 1963 only specified a subset of modern ASCII. https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG ht

by bhaak 3y ago

Not exactly. The first edition form 1963 only specified a subset of modern ASCII. https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... Bits 6 and 7 were mostly unassigned. Obviously, lowercase characters didn't exist in 1963, they were invented later and that's why they added them later. The version from 1968 is basically what we consider to be ASCII. /s From what I remember, I think this was due to compatibility reasons to old teletype(?) hardware but those reservations went out of the windows pretty fast though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#History

mike_hock 3y ago
> Obviously, lowercase characters didn't exist in 1963, they were invented later and that's why they added them later. Lowercase letters were invented in 1967 and later backported to cursive writing for use in hospitals to thwart Chinese medical espionage.
Someone 3y ago
https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/index.html https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... has the full 1963 standard (12 jpg’s) I find it interesting to read the section on considerations. They, for example, mention that COBOL is supported, but ALGOL isn’t, explain how the standard could be extended for use for “European alphabets” (they could use the 5 values after Z and the one before A for additional letters) or “base 12 numeric digits” (to support pre-decimalization British monetary values)
- bhaak 3y ago
  > how the standard could be extended for use for “European alphabets” (they could use the 5 values after Z and the one before A for additional letters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#7-bit_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#7-bit_codes They not only could, they actually did. Now you know why C has trigraphs.

by bhaak 3y ago

mike_hock 3y ago

> Obviously, lowercase characters didn't exist in 1963, they were invented later and that's why they added them later. Lowercase letters were invented in 1967 and later backported to cursive writing for use in hospitals to thwart Chinese medical espionage.

Someone 3y ago

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/index.html https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... has the full 1963 standard (12 jpg’s) I find it interesting to read the section on considerations. They, for example, mention that COBOL is supported, but ALGOL isn’t, explain how the standard could be extended for use for “European alphabets” (they could use the 5 values after Z and the one before A for additional letters) or “base 12 numeric digits” (to support pre-decimalization British monetary values)

bhaak 3y ago
> how the standard could be extended for use for “European alphabets” (they could use the 5 values after Z and the one before A for additional letters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#7-bit_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#7-bit_codes They not only could, they actually did. Now you know why C has trigraphs.