Post B2HYpdyp36fDVOknDc by mwichary@mastodon.online
(DIR) More posts by mwichary@mastodon.online
(DIR) Post #AvJOWSaBbmm8hOKlyy by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T03:37:34Z
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Once in a while I imagine how much more pleasant HTML would be to type if only different brackets were originally chosen. [div] [p] [a href=‘’][/a] [/p][/div]No single Shift press was necessary here.
(DIR) Post #B1DApZ6B1ylVVpCIIi by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T09:29:09Z
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Now curious exactly why SGML chose angle brackets! Would love to see a written statement. This is the closest I got to an answer, but it’s not really an answer.https://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.connolly.html
(DIR) Post #B1DApa3NTs7WTQtZZo by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T09:51:51Z
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This is from the standard, which I found online here: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub152.pdf(That footnote is prescient.)There are references to an 1980 draft, but wonder if that would be explained there. There probably also also working group notes…
(DIR) Post #B1DApajYx1reaGdGKW by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T10:13:48Z
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Poring over SGML Handbook from Goldfarb himself (Goldfarb is the “G” in GML).SGML had some wild features!https://archive.org/details/sgmlhandbook0000gold/
(DIR) Post #B1DApbUM93IKvOWdGa by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T10:38:41Z
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Very interesting! https://jtc1info.org/sd-2-history/jtc1-subcommittees/sc-34/Not sure those are available online…
(DIR) Post #B1DApcLWxLpTaJP69I by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T11:04:48Z
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I sent some emails, but I am not sure if this is going to go anywhere. It’s wild that there isn’t an authoritative answer online, given how much of modern “online” uses HTML and angle brackets.
(DIR) Post #B1DApd9rwC5y6QxIbw by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T11:49:42Z
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More from the same person writing about “chicken scratches.” Includes a tantalizing cover page of a working document.https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol23/html/Mason01/BalisageVol23-Mason01.html
(DIR) Post #B1DApe4wVzkUxResZU by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-20T21:20:44Z
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Still digging.“To encourage acceptance, the authors of the SGML specification followed other design objectives: the ability to enter text and markup on "the millions of existing text entry devices"; no character set dependency; no national language bias; and markup usable by both humans and programs.”https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000465.shtml
(DIR) Post #B1DApek436dt0ytifQ by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-21T02:18:43Z
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Thanks to my emails but also people who were participating today, I got an email from one of the key players that sent me some great leads and info to investigate! (Including a PDF of the report I was salivating over earlier.) It turns out the angle brackets are at most from 1979, if not earlier. More to research!
(DIR) Post #B1DApfWH9rCtQVSDoW by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-21T02:32:27Z
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This is the earliest appearance of < > I know of today, from 1979.This thread might slow down, as next step will be some interlibrary requests!
(DIR) Post #B1DApgPZqFRWC1KO0m by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-21T02:37:17Z
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This might be more interesting. <P1> and <P2>! <#> for styling! Excited to dig and learn more.
(DIR) Post #B1DAphFKjoqKmXXigS by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-21T03:12:00Z
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They are *killing me*. In the old article about the history of it that I just discovered, they are using… square brackets.
(DIR) Post #B1DAphpqY43Abmcsb2 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-23T21:18:08Z
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They really are killing me.
(DIR) Post #B1DApiadk5TqwuWFX6 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-24T00:39:52Z
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Fired some interlibrary requests. Wish me luck!
(DIR) Post #B1DApjF3Jpo4yFQWWW by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-06-25T14:06:43Z
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Is this going to go anywhere? Unclear. But I like this part.
(DIR) Post #B1DApkA7tdSbpG86U4 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-07-05T03:58:54Z
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I like scanning and putting up interlibrary stuff on Internet Archive. This is the first one I got. Not sure yet if it’s going to help with the HTML bracket investigation, but maybe it’ll help someone else! https://archive.org/details/gca-standard-101-1983
(DIR) Post #B1DApkkdhsfReVDGOe by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-13T05:56:27Z
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Believe it or not, I’m still figuring out where HTML got its angle brackets. But despite grabbing a lot of interlibrary items, I am not sure I’m getting any closer. I still have some ideas, but one involves going to a museum in Maine, which might take a while.However, good news (for someone?): There are now over 40 papers and books I scanned that deal with history of markup. Enjoy!https://archive.org/details/wicharytypewriter?tab=collection&query=subject%3A%22markup%22
(DIR) Post #B1DApqoPAnFERv1M6C by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-13T14:37:10Z
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Oh look, here’s some ampersands.
(DIR) Post #B1ETuaKtwxNH5M9T5U by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-14T07:46:15Z
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@mwichary Fwiw, < and > are in 1963 ASCII, and as noted are not "common" conversational characters. They are not in ITA2. They are present in FIELDATA. Would there be any significant implications from folk aligned with early programming language issues, the instability of early symbol/glyphs in function implementation vs reference? While charsets would have been somewhat settled by late 70s folks with early experience would think differently about things.
(DIR) Post #B1EU5sCbrcfZgLejLc by gnomon@mastodon.social
2025-12-13T20:44:04Z
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@mwichary psst @mhoye , I think you'll enjoy this HTML/SGML/GML history spelunking thread 👀↑↑(edit: courtesy of @feonixrift )
(DIR) Post #B1EU5tGXuTPcyqVO7c by mhoye@mastodon.social
2025-12-13T20:54:35Z
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@gnomon @mwichary @feonixrift Nice! Marcin, thank you for this. If it contributes anything to the cause, I found a number of citations back when I was trying to figure out why programmers start counting from zero, that talked about the credible rodeo keyboards and character sets were back in the larval stages of this industry, and how Dennis Ritchie picked square brackets for array notation in part because they were available on most of the keyboards nearby when he worked at Bell Labs.
(DIR) Post #B1EU5txnJg0V8yjvX6 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-14T07:48:14Z
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@mhoyeYeah this is the line of thought I was after. @gnomon @mwichary @feonixrift
(DIR) Post #B1cgjar9u927BC7d20 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-26T00:03:00Z
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@mhoyeIf register X is the address of an array in memory, 0 is the value you add to that register to access the location pointed to by X. @gnomon @mwichary @feonixrift
(DIR) Post #B2HYpQFg5dpOvcX3Y0 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-15T17:19:21Z
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Wrote down what I learned so far and open questions in this new doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16QNavHjds1OdkKsfqLYx6EF0ohA-Qh_dZc8OK9TFrQk/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.z1r9lwho309s…in case you are interested in seeing where I am and what are my next steps, and maybe have new ideas. Thanks in advance! The doc is free to comment, or you can always ping me here.EDIT: Please do not tag/bother Tim Berners-Lee. Angle brackets happened many years before he started working on HTML.#MarkupMonday
(DIR) Post #B2HYpR9gjOdBjKjmqm by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-18T15:20:22Z
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I really like this way of annotating/commenting on an old document – in this case an old markup language called PUB, from Larry Tesler himself. I just wish it worked on mobile as well. And, perhaps, that it would show the scanned pages rather than recreated ones. Something about that feels important to me.https://www.nomodes.com/history/pub-manual
(DIR) Post #B2HYpS4lJCHiaLRMoK by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-23T05:21:59Z
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Oh, hello, angle brackets GOING THE OTHER WAY.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpSb1NG5aCOX85o by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-23T05:28:17Z
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Part of this kind of amazing-looking phototypesetting machine… but then again, all of them were amazing-looking.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpTSu8vBstVkA52 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-23T05:44:59Z
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Case in point: Another phototypesetting machine, this time with my beloved braces.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpU5BqZocoFejku by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-24T16:38:48Z
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Yet another typesetting system (1971), this time with only opening angle brackets.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpUtso6MhLTNDlo by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-24T18:21:22Z
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Very close (<b>!), but the tags are ongoing, rather than opening and closing.This is microcomputers, and called ASPIC? Never heard of it before.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpVjHizTvutQGtE by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-24T18:24:29Z
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I am vibing with ASPIC! But it’s also kind of strange from the perspective of HTML that escaped delimiters are also regular tags.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpWINcVYRfjqIam by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-24T18:53:59Z
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Ah, it seems ASPIC stands for Authors’ Symbolic Prepress Interfacing Codes or Authors’ Standard Prepress Interfacing Code, and was specifically made and popular in the U.K. Loving the [] for new line/paragraph.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpX9CS7o0JYYTvE by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-24T19:18:25Z
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Thank you to @apples_and_pears for letting me know about XyWrite, a word processor that used guillemets! Because why not.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpXqnq0gSUmxIsy by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-25T23:18:54Z
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If not guillemets, then maybe slashes will be to your liking.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpYkSV5CfHOzkdU by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-25T23:52:42Z
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Or if you don’t like slashes, there might be ways around that, too (h/t @dalke).
(DIR) Post #B2HYpZZrPyJtqp2nku by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T04:49:45Z
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PS if anyone is curious about the current tally, the earliest appearance of angle brackets for markup I can see was is 1965, with the British COCOA. But not sure if it influenced anything that came after. I’m trying to find out more about it.https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/applications/cocoa/p001.htm
(DIR) Post #B2HYpaPcJXiiRLG8Qa by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T04:56:59Z
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That is 60 years ago!!!
(DIR) Post #B2HYpb41tI2wSgAPQ0 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T17:48:23Z
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It’s funny, seeing some computer at the library tabulating numbers that don’t really make sense. (I’m guessing one of the books I interlibraried had some exorbitant value on some used-books site?)
(DIR) Post #B2HYpc0sMV7NPBhP8q by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T22:41:47Z
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1972 and a new form of escaping. This is a system called RCA Page-1, and if I understand it correctly, it implies =(alpha)= for characters unavailable on the computer keyboard, but available.In a deliciously meta way, they also talk about how they needed angle brackets to be different to less-than/greater-than – perhaps similar to the mathematical ⟨⟩ angle brackets?Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/362248.362279
(DIR) Post #B2HYpcc686tNGd789w by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T22:42:42Z
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This is interesting because of all the brackets I have seen systems shy away from () for obvious reasons. This is the first approaching it, but carefully and surrounded by = presumably as this makes the combination unlikely to appear in source text.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpdG9jAw1Grr7b6 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T22:43:46Z
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Ah yes, elsewhere in the paper they make it explicit!
(DIR) Post #B2HYpdyp36fDVOknDc by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T22:56:19Z
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I mean some of this is just really fascinating. 1966:
(DIR) Post #B2HYpedabXH1XppLlI by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T22:58:05Z
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Same paper, and here are angle brackets put to use to indicate upper- and lowercase, presumably on a machine like a teletype that supports only uppercase.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpfMbu9HnnStIw4 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-26T22:59:27Z
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Honestly, I feel like I still have months of interlibrary requests until I follow all the citations and nooks and crannies here. But at this point I’m really starting to dig into the (photo)typesetting parts and that’s really fun and all foreign to me.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpg6h8o9K6OS6lc by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-27T04:51:42Z
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We didn’t see dollar signs yet, did we?
(DIR) Post #B2HYpgyvt9XCobpQJ6 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-27T16:01:48Z
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This is an interesting way. Instead of delimiters using punctuation, a combination of regular in-band letters (qq) is used that is just not meant to appear in real text.
(DIR) Post #B2HYphgtFihF0wOWp6 by mwichary@mastodon.online
2025-12-27T16:07:20Z
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And this one has double braces, which presumably avoids the need to escape single braces if the appear in text.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpiVEEYxjX3wjHk by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T04:51:55Z
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Oh, wow. Got a book about RCA PAGE-1, a typesetting system which came out in 1967. In it, they talk about typical stuff like [tf,4;mi,50;bs,100;mx,150] for changing fonts, and [ob] for italics/oblique and [ro] to go back to Roman… …but the also have a concept of [c1] and [c2] and [c3] that are actually starting to feel kind of semantic! They still are more for macrodefinitions/expansion – kind of like the “Lucy” of this space – but that’s much earlier than I expected.Also: braces. 😍
(DIR) Post #B2HYpjBPhihrdtgQ2S by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T04:52:34Z
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Scanned the book here if you are interested! https://archive.org/details/computer-composition-using-page-1And more information about RCA PAGE-1 (VideoComp) is here: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/ARCHIVE-RCA/RCA-Engineer/1968-04-05.pdf
(DIR) Post #B2HYpjxcoTGs3QEvBY by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T04:56:57Z
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By the way, I have never heard of a roman (non italic/non oblique) style being referred to as “erect.”
(DIR) Post #B2HYpkkXsaP2V97zRA by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T05:12:56Z
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I’m trying to figure out what were the keyboards that were used with RCA VideoComp (or Hell Digiset, which I understand is the alt/original name of the device). One of the arguments against braces and pro angle brackets is that the latter weren’t easily available – but at least here it seems this wasn’t a problem.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpleuV1UPJxV0IC by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T05:17:29Z
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“A battery of girls on perforators.” https://www.nytimes.com/1967/11/16/archives/processing-of-long-book-is-entirely-by-computer.htmlI just ordered online on Biblio a copy of that book, just for fun. It’s not expensive.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpmYv8mIC7fhjay by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T05:21:43Z
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I don’t know yet what layout perforators were used, but here’s the RCA Spectra terminal, using a pretty standard Selectric keyboard (and some other buttons – a pretty typical setup of the time).What’s interesting is that <> are nowhere to be seen, but [] are there as alts on the 1 key.https://archive.org/details/TNM_RCA_Spectra_70-752_video_data_terminal_20180205_0106
(DIR) Post #B2HYpnEkdFkkDPH8nQ by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T05:23:26Z
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Where we would expect <> today are just , . But they’re also available unshifted.This was pretty typical for typewriters. Shifting was kind of heavy, and ,. punctuation very common… so often ,. were there both shifted and unshifted on those two keys.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpo97Fgq72De9eS by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-10T05:54:15Z
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Elsewhere in RCA docs, ASCII is already being referred to, with <> listed, but [] or {} not available. Interesting! And the teletype console seems to have only () and maybe <>? What a mess! I might not get anywhere here.
(DIR) Post #B2HYpos8YIqtHqi6pE by mwichary@mastodon.online
2026-01-14T14:02:15Z
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I was so eager to scan this after it came because it was months before one appeared on eBay!This is a manual for a popular Compugraphic typesetter, with a very different approach to markup that’s more similar to control characters in e.g. WordStar.Everything is based on specialized keys, and displayed with special characters, shade, and underline.Imagine a version of HTML where you’d need a keyboard with a key for each tag!Check it out here: https://archive.org/details/compugraphic-edit-writer-family