[HN Gopher] ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control charact...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control characters (1968)
       [pdf]
        
       Author : susam
       Score  : 80 points
       Date   : 2024-06-22 07:39 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ecma-international.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ecma-international.org)
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | Didn't catch on. ^C did, mapping to ascii equivalent just worked.
       | "Hat" for control key was a winner.
        
         | 9dev wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | Not sure if free, but they should be able to provide any
         | current standard.
        
       | tuukkah wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
         | PCs weren't yet a dominant computing platform for most of the
         | 80s.
        
       | zeitgeistcowboy wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | Old machines? Type "print(chr(7))" into the latest Python REPL
         | and see what happens :)
        
           | teddyh wrote:
           | print("\a")
        
       | FabHK wrote:
       | A bit of background on those control characters and what they
       | mean:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes
        
       | dartos wrote:
       | Why have symbolic and alphabetic, I wonder
        
       | proneb1rd wrote:
       | TIL. The burger icon (LF) was invented in 1968
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-06-23 23:01 UTC)