-=> Quoting George White to Leonard Erickson <=-

 GW> Hi Leonard,

 GW> You wrote to me about my message to Murray Lesser:
 
 LE> -=> Quoting George White to Murray Lesser <=-
 
 LE> ML>    Nowadays, the Average Idiot Home User hasn't heard of any
character
 LE> ML>code other than ASCII, if even that :-(.  As you well know, the stupid
 LE> ML>collating sequence of ASCII is due to the great desire of AT&T to pack
 LE> ML>everything they thought anybody would ever want into seven bits, while
 LE> ML>letting the presence of a single bit differentiate between lower- and
 LE> ML>upper-case alpha characters (a desirable characteristic only for fully
 LE> ML>mechanical terminals).
 
 LE>ASCII *was* defined in 1963 (or was it 68?) you know. It was originally
 LE>intended as a standard for moving data between different brands of
 LE>mainframes (which all had their *own* character sets back then)

 GW> I hope Murray sees this, I wasn't interested in this aspect of the
 GW> message. As you have raised it with me, according to a reference I
 GW> have here (C Programmers Guide to Serial Communications by Joe
 GW> Campbell), the official title of the ASCII specification is "ANSI
 GW> Standard X3.4-1977 (Revised 1983), Code for Information Interchange",
 GW> so from this I believe it's more recent than the dates you remember.

Not necessarily. "X3.4-1977" means "the 1977 version of standard X.34".

I'm pretty sure I've got pre-1977 references to ASCII, but those books
are in storage.
 
 LE> ML>standpoint) has never been a requirement for standards committees!  (I
 LE> ML>have a great dislike, based on many years of past participation, of
most
 LE> ML>computer-related standardizing activities.  The standards committee
 LE> ML>members seem to be more interested in showing how smart they are than
in
 LE> ML>following Euripides' "legacy" law of computer architecture:  "The gods
 LE> ML>visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.")
 
 LE> GW> I think of the ANSI screen control sequences as a classic example of
 LE> GW> that "cleverness", even though they are really DEC terminal control
 LE> GW> sequences.
 
 LE>They are derived from DEC control sequences for the VT-52. The ESC was
 LE>turned into ESC[ so that DEC wouldn't have an unfair advantage in the
 LE>market. The VT-100 came *after* the X3.64 standard was defined.

 GW> That counts in my book as "really". just changing "ESC" to "ESC[" does
 GW> nothing to change the basis of the control sequences. How a change as
 GW> simple to incorporate as that can be considered as removing an "unfair
 GW> advantage" when Joe Campbell's (Op Cit) description of writing the
 GW> code to interpret it (an input driver) is "a Herculean labor" (it's an
 GW> American book and I'm retaining the American spelling used therein).

Remember, back then you had to use discrete logic to decode the
sequences. So even a change that minor did make things a bit tougher. 

But the point was that by making the change, they made it impossible
for any product *currently on the market* to claim to be "ANSI
compatible. *Everyone* had to produce new models.


--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30