Re: [MacPerl] Character translation problem

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 22:12 -0700 9/13/99, Rich Morin wrote:
> The original ASCII character set had only
>127 characters, corresponding to the values 0-127 (00-7F in hex;
>00000000-01111111 in binary).

And that's still the ONLY "ASCII" character set.  The various extensions
are not ASCII.

PS:  the extension of ASCII to the 8-bit environment was controversial,
with IBM wanting "bit 8" to be a copy of "bit 6" (1-based, 1 on the "right"
of the byte).  Note the odd things this does to the character set...the
alphabets are broken up, etc etc.

When IBM was the only committee member which wanted this, they took their
ball and went home, inflicting the world with a couple of decades of EBCDIC
encoding.  The rest of the committee reached consensus pretty easily at
that point, giving us the ASCII in the 8 bit environment which remains
today.  [My office mate was NCR's rep on the committee.]

BTW, IBM lost out again with ANSI tape labelling:  The initial label was
specified to be in ASCII, although EBCDIC could be used for much of the
rest.

   --John
--
John Baxter, Port Ludlow, WA USA
Source unknown: Remember that the ark was built by amateurs and the Titanic
was built by professionals.

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