4 ms·

I really hate to nitpick, but the article implies that ASCII was the first character encoding. In fact, there was a rich history of different encodings before t

I really hate to nitpick, but the article implies that ASCII was the first character encoding. In fact, there was a rich history of different encodings before that, with different word sizes and/or incompatible 8 bit encodings. It's quite interesting to look back and see what trade-offs were made and why.

ygra 13y ago
Well, it's the oldest character set and encoding that's still semi-relevant today. I doubt many people nowadays encounter EBCDIC and the like (and if they do, the article isn't aimed at them, I guess).
- mcherm 13y ago
  I encounter it occasionally. (Although I am certainly not the article's target demographic.)
  - huhtenberg 13y ago
    > What’s a bit? > What’s a byte? I'm not sure what the target demographic is.
    - drdaeman 13y ago
      > What’s a byte? > A byte is a set of 8 bits. Nitpicking, that's octet, not byte. I believe the distinction was lost and don't think byte has a proper definition anymore.
      - fosap 13y ago
        But for historical encodings that kind of matters. Because a byte was not always 8 bit we have to deal with utf-7 and had to ensure things where 8 bit clean. And utf-9.
- VLM 13y ago
  But it misses some relevant semi-dramatic story. For all practical purposes EBCDIC is the "IBM Standard" as opposed to ASCII's "American Standard". The mood in the 70s/80s outside the business world was "In your face IBM!" And putting "Information Interchange" in the name itself is another "In Your Face" posturing to the mainframe world. We're the future of data transmission and you'd best get used to it, IBM... ASCII really was a rebellion in the olden times. One that won. Another story was before ASCII note that teletype codes and such were usually modal, LTRS/FIGS to switch from 5-bit letters to 5-bit numbers. So there's that dramatic great circular wheel of IT where we've oscillated both before and after ASCII between simple encodings and modal encodings. This was an early whine against unicode, who cares about codepages, just embed it like, or in, what amounts to the MIME media type, and glyph-like Asian languages should just be drawn in gif files anyway. Or so the complaints went at that time. Another design statement story: Kind of like the Uni- in unicode uniting all the extended code pages into one really huge space. There are other dramatic stories not in the article. For example the Klingon in Unicode movement. Basically about 15 years ago they tried to get Klingon script into unicode, about a decade ago the unicode people (who?) said no, so the Klingon people squatted in the unicode equivalent of what networking people would call RFC1918 space, and its simmered since then. Will Klingon actually make it into unicode officially or not, who knows. You can add to the fire by pointing out that Unicode is already stuffed with scripts that no living human culture currently uses, and numerous glyph symbols (think of math stuff like + or %) On the other hand this would inevitably result in Tolkien Elvish script being included in unicode. And does this really matter one way or the other? And this maps perfectly into the wikipedia battle between the deletionist (expletive deleted) and the inclusionist saviors of humanity. Well maybe that last line was a little biased to my opinions... There's tons of extra fun drama to tell about unicode and cutting off the story at the founding of ASCII misses some of the fun drama. Aside from some fun drama that wasn't mentioned in a post aimed at non-techs who we're told really like drama. You could probably turn the Unicode story into a trashy reality TV show somehow; Vampire Romance Fiction is going to be a harder translation although I'd love to see it.
  - kps 13y ago
    IBM was actually quite involved in the development of ASCII. See Charles E. MacKenzie, Coded Character Sets: History and Development [1] and Bob Bemer's stuff [2]. [1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8019369W/Coded_Character_Sets http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8019369W/Coded_Character_Sets [2] http://www.bobbemer.com/ http://www.bobbemer.com/
D9u 13y ago
In the beginning there was smoke signals
chiph 13y ago
Baudot, baby! Had the advantage that an open carrier (all zeros) mapped to NULL so you didn't waste paper (either tape or roll).
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Had? Baudot is alive and well on the HF bands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTTY
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Yeah, but does anyone still use the Gauss-Weber Telegraph Alphabet? [1] 1. http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unicode-and-oracle.html http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unic...

ygra 13y ago

Well, it's the oldest character set and encoding that's still semi-relevant today. I doubt many people nowadays encounter EBCDIC and the like (and if they do, the article isn't aimed at them, I guess).

mcherm 13y ago
I encounter it occasionally. (Although I am certainly not the article's target demographic.)
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  > What’s a bit? > What’s a byte? I'm not sure what the target demographic is.
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    > What’s a byte? > A byte is a set of 8 bits. Nitpicking, that's octet, not byte. I believe the distinction was lost and don't think byte has a proper definition anymore.
    - fosap 13y ago
      But for historical encodings that kind of matters. Because a byte was not always 8 bit we have to deal with utf-7 and had to ensure things where 8 bit clean. And utf-9.
VLM 13y ago
But it misses some relevant semi-dramatic story. For all practical purposes EBCDIC is the "IBM Standard" as opposed to ASCII's "American Standard". The mood in the 70s/80s outside the business world was "In your face IBM!" And putting "Information Interchange" in the name itself is another "In Your Face" posturing to the mainframe world. We're the future of data transmission and you'd best get used to it, IBM... ASCII really was a rebellion in the olden times. One that won. Another story was before ASCII note that teletype codes and such were usually modal, LTRS/FIGS to switch from 5-bit letters to 5-bit numbers. So there's that dramatic great circular wheel of IT where we've oscillated both before and after ASCII between simple encodings and modal encodings. This was an early whine against unicode, who cares about codepages, just embed it like, or in, what amounts to the MIME media type, and glyph-like Asian languages should just be drawn in gif files anyway. Or so the complaints went at that time. Another design statement story: Kind of like the Uni- in unicode uniting all the extended code pages into one really huge space. There are other dramatic stories not in the article. For example the Klingon in Unicode movement. Basically about 15 years ago they tried to get Klingon script into unicode, about a decade ago the unicode people (who?) said no, so the Klingon people squatted in the unicode equivalent of what networking people would call RFC1918 space, and its simmered since then. Will Klingon actually make it into unicode officially or not, who knows. You can add to the fire by pointing out that Unicode is already stuffed with scripts that no living human culture currently uses, and numerous glyph symbols (think of math stuff like + or %) On the other hand this would inevitably result in Tolkien Elvish script being included in unicode. And does this really matter one way or the other? And this maps perfectly into the wikipedia battle between the deletionist (expletive deleted) and the inclusionist saviors of humanity. Well maybe that last line was a little biased to my opinions... There's tons of extra fun drama to tell about unicode and cutting off the story at the founding of ASCII misses some of the fun drama. Aside from some fun drama that wasn't mentioned in a post aimed at non-techs who we're told really like drama. You could probably turn the Unicode story into a trashy reality TV show somehow; Vampire Romance Fiction is going to be a harder translation although I'd love to see it.
- kps 13y ago
  IBM was actually quite involved in the development of ASCII. See Charles E. MacKenzie, Coded Character Sets: History and Development [1] and Bob Bemer's stuff [2]. [1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8019369W/Coded_Character_Sets http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8019369W/Coded_Character_Sets [2] http://www.bobbemer.com/ http://www.bobbemer.com/

D9u 13y ago

In the beginning there was smoke signals

chiph 13y ago

Baudot, baby! Had the advantage that an open carrier (all zeros) mapped to NULL so you didn't waste paper (either tape or roll).

nknighthb 13y ago
Had? Baudot is alive and well on the HF bands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTTY
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Yeah, but does anyone still use the Gauss-Weber Telegraph Alphabet? [1] 1. http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unicode-and-oracle.html http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unic...