5 ms·

ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control characters (1968) [pdf]

93 points by susam 2y ago

ggm 2y ago
Didn't catch on. ^C did, mapping to ascii equivalent just worked. "Hat" for control key was a winner.
- 9dev 2y ago
  That confused me a lot when I started using Linux as a teenager. There wasn’t really an explanation anywhere, some commands would just show ^Something and assume you’d know what to do. When I finally figured out, the terminal made a lot more sense.
nikeee 2y ago
I'm curious: Is there still a free copy available from ECMA in switzerland? I mean, besides this scanned one. I just love printed stuff.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Not sure if free, but they should be able to provide any current standard.
tuukkah 2y ago
Interesting how they didn't use hexadecimal the same way as we do today, instead writing e.g. the code position 0x7F as 7/15.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
It would be interesting to read how they decided on these specific symbols, or if that knowledge is lost to time. I feel like sometimes standards would benefit from including a non-normative section explaining a bit more of the reasoning behind specific design decisions.
hetman 2y ago
Apparently this later became ISO 2047 and most of these characters are mapped into Unicode (with the exception of a few which have reasonable substitutes). I was wishing for something like this recently so I'm genuinely pleased to know this exists.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Which ones aren't? I think I've seen them all in during my work with adding legacy characters to Unicode 13 and now 16.
userbinator 2y ago
These didn't get much use as far as I know (and many computers of the 60s still used 6-bit characters and not anything resembling ASCII), but I think CP437 became the de-facto representation of the low characters for most of the 80s through at least the mid 90s. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage-437.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  PCs weren't yet a dominant computing platform for most of the 80s.
zeitgeistcowboy 2y ago
Character 7 is still a bell! I always loved that when you printed ASCII character 7 on old machines it made a sound instead of printing a character.
- qsort 2y ago
  Old machines? Type "print(chr(7))" into the latest Python REPL and see what happens :)
  - teddyh 2y ago
    print("\a")
FabHK 2y ago
A bit of background on those control characters and what they mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes
Hemagowda 2y ago
[flagged]
dartos 2y ago
Why have symbolic and alphabetic, I wonder
- dusted 2y ago
  I think the idea was to be able to communicate them on devices that did not have the symbols (which turned out to be pretty much all of them)
proneb1rd 2y ago
TIL. The burger icon (LF) was invented in 1968
seoulbigchris 2y ago
If anyone is old enough to remember Joe Campbell's "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications", there was an excellent ASCII wall chart, which used these symbols for the control characters.
dusted 2y ago
It's amazingly interesting to me that these exist and yet, do not seem to be commonly available in ascii fonts
gschizas 2y ago
Interesting. With a few exceptions (namely, BS/HT/LF/VT), these are identical on what the Amstrad CPC character set (https://archive.org/details/SOFT968TheAmstrad6128FirmwareManual/page/n431/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/SOFT968TheAmstrad6128FirmwareMan...) looks like. Which was probably a copy from some other character set ROM.

93 points by susam 2y ago

ggm 2y ago

Didn't catch on. ^C did, mapping to ascii equivalent just worked. "Hat" for control key was a winner.

9dev 2y ago
That confused me a lot when I started using Linux as a teenager. There wasn’t really an explanation anywhere, some commands would just show ^Something and assume you’d know what to do. When I finally figured out, the terminal made a lot more sense.

nikeee 2y ago

I'm curious: Is there still a free copy available from ECMA in switzerland? I mean, besides this scanned one. I just love printed stuff.

rbanffy 2y ago
Not sure if free, but they should be able to provide any current standard.

tuukkah 2y ago

Interesting how they didn't use hexadecimal the same way as we do today, instead writing e.g. the code position 0x7F as 7/15.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

It would be interesting to read how they decided on these specific symbols, or if that knowledge is lost to time. I feel like sometimes standards would benefit from including a non-normative section explaining a bit more of the reasoning behind specific design decisions.

hetman 2y ago

Apparently this later became ISO 2047 and most of these characters are mapped into Unicode (with the exception of a few which have reasonable substitutes). I was wishing for something like this recently so I'm genuinely pleased to know this exists.

rbanffy 2y ago
Which ones aren't? I think I've seen them all in during my work with adding legacy characters to Unicode 13 and now 16.

userbinator 2y ago

These didn't get much use as far as I know (and many computers of the 60s still used 6-bit characters and not anything resembling ASCII), but I think CP437 became the de-facto representation of the low characters for most of the 80s through at least the mid 90s. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage-437.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
PCs weren't yet a dominant computing platform for most of the 80s.

zeitgeistcowboy 2y ago

Character 7 is still a bell! I always loved that when you printed ASCII character 7 on old machines it made a sound instead of printing a character.

qsort 2y ago
Old machines? Type "print(chr(7))" into the latest Python REPL and see what happens :)
- teddyh 2y ago
  print("\a")

FabHK 2y ago

A bit of background on those control characters and what they mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes

Hemagowda 2y ago

[flagged]

dartos 2y ago

Why have symbolic and alphabetic, I wonder

dusted 2y ago
I think the idea was to be able to communicate them on devices that did not have the symbols (which turned out to be pretty much all of them)

proneb1rd 2y ago

TIL. The burger icon (LF) was invented in 1968

seoulbigchris 2y ago

If anyone is old enough to remember Joe Campbell's "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications", there was an excellent ASCII wall chart, which used these symbols for the control characters.

dusted 2y ago

It's amazingly interesting to me that these exist and yet, do not seem to be commonly available in ascii fonts

gschizas 2y ago

Interesting. With a few exceptions (namely, BS/HT/LF/VT), these are identical on what the Amstrad CPC character set (https://archive.org/details/SOFT968TheAmstrad6128FirmwareManual/page/n431/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/SOFT968TheAmstrad6128FirmwareMan...) looks like. Which was probably a copy from some other character set ROM.