3 ms·
If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing: e <backspace character> ' Which was called "overstriking".
by bawolff 1y ago
If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing:
e <backspace character> '
Which was called "overstriking".
- PyWoody 1y agoIf you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript
- demetrius 1y agoIota subscript is a 12-century invention. Rough and smooth breathings (ἁ for ha, ἀ for a) are much older Greek diacritics. For another example of classical diacritics, see apices in Latin (á for long a).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kps 1y agoYes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).
- wanderingstan 1y agoInteresting! The z80 card in my family’s Apple 2 would render “^” as “↑” and I always wondered the connection. I guess they were using the original spec.
- kps 1y agoAnd probably ‘←’ where we now have ‘_’. Character-generator ICs with the 1963 64-character set hung on around for a couple decades.
- int_19h 1y agoThis comes from typewriters. Curiously, the reason why Esperanto uses Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, and Ŝ is because the circumflex was present on French typewriters (which were very common in Europe at the time). Even though French itself only uses it for Â, Ê, Û - since it was a distinct key used for overtyping, it could be repurposed in this manner, just like Unicode combining marks today.