Coded Character Sets
by Charles E. MacKenzie · first published 1979
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2013–2024first – last mentioned
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…of the reasons are still very compelling. In fact, a distressingly large number of them have to do with the various techniques for encoding bytes on punch cards. For the curious, I recommend the book "Coded Character Sets: History and Development" by Charles E. Mackenzie. It's an older book, and so it's about the pre-Unicode, US-centric codes. Also, most of the pages focus on the many variants of EBCDIC rather than the…
on “ASCII is 50 years old” ↗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 [2] http://www.bobbemer.com/
on “How ASCII lost and unicode won” ↗…in favour of ^ (because furriners wanted accents), and a left arrow ‘←’ dropped in favour of ‘_’.⁵⁶ ¹Jean Sammet, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals 978-0137299881 ²Charles E. MacKenzie, Coded Character Sets: History and Development 978-0201144604 ³http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/SURVEY.HTM ⁴R W Bemer, Design of an improved transmission/data processing code http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/366532.366538 ⁵American…
on “Why do programming languages use curly braces?” ↗…communications at dec, and had just been doing research at mit, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if he, or friends of his from mit or dec, were to sit on the ansi (then asa) committee mackenzie's 'coded character sets' from 01980 has a chapter 13 about ascii https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedC... but unfortunately it doesn't go into any detail on the composition of the asa committee. note…
on “Gordon Bell has died” ↗No. 5 and 6 bit codes existed. And according to Wikipedia (which cites a book "Coded Character Sets, History and Development") making ASCII an 8 bit encoding was considered (not to encode more characters, but to embed BCD data efficiently) but not done because reducing the required bandwith for all…
on “UTF-8 – "The most elegant hack"” ↗