Re: [OT] Re: Progress!

Radomir 'The Sheep' Dopieralski wrote:
At Thu, 13 Apr 2006 11:11:03 -0700,
Ray Dillinger wrote:


Jeff Lait wrote:


But I digress....


No, that's very interesting, are there any resources you could
point to on the subject?


You're asking about things that happened in the Elder Days.
There was no character set standard when computers started
to be built; each manufacturer and most hobbyist homebuilders,
assigned their own codepoints in their own character set,
if they were building machines that even had a concept of
"character." Many early systems just had instructions and
numbers. They chose and assigned codes sometimes for reasons
of doing whatever it was they were doing with least stress
on the hardware or with the simplest possible hardware, and
sometimes for psychological/numerological reasons that escape
comprehension.

Getting computers talking to each other often involved nerds
with soldering irons building "translator boxes" out of bell wire
and logic chips they purchased at radio shack. Occasionally
you could do it in software, but it would be challenging,
because the recieving system would of course assume that the
transmission was in its own character set and byte length,
and differences in byte length (here I use the term as it was
used then, meaning the distance in bits between the closest
distinct machine addresses) meant that the meaning of an
individual "character" would cycle through as many states
as the least common multiple of the byte lengths. Several
character sets complicated things by having "halfbytes" that
were used for some particular coded meanings.

This was tolerable because networking wasn't generally one of
the things anybody wanted dissimilar computers to do at that
time, with the exception of a few weirdos here and there. The
idea was, you bought all your computers from one vendor and they
were all alike and used the same character set and they could
talk to each other. The weirdos were the ones who wanted to
bring computers that somebody else owned onto the network, which
manufacturers resisted, of course, because they like their
customers to be "locked in" to buying from them.

The Baudot teletype code was used as a "common tongue" for a
while, because it was already widely established with teletypes
(UPI and AP networks, stock tickertape machines, etc) and
telegraph systems (common carriers like Western Union telegraphy,
etc) and people wanted their computers to be able to communicate
with these systems. So a lot of "teletype adapters" were built
to allow computers to be used with these things, and the
inevitable result was that there was no way you could really
prevent some other manufacturer's computer from being able to
talk to yours anymore. And there was wailing and gnashing of
teeth, and warnings about such usage "not recommended" and "not
under warranty" and "may be hazardous to your machine" and so
on.

Eventually "compatibility" was finally identified as actually
being desirable in some contexts, because you could use it as
a buzzword to make a sale to a customer fed-up with what were
the standard industry lock-in tactics at the time. It allowed
you to wear the "white hat" as far as your customer was concerned,
by rescuing them from character-set lock-in. Also, a bunch of
computer sellers felt that they were missing out on sales
because once their competitors had a customer the customer
could never change companies to buy their stuff.

So they got together, each with the idea of finally being able
to win customers over from the others, and invented ascii. IBM
was the last holdout, pushing EBCDIC to the bitter end, because
they were the biggest company and had the most to lose if
customers could just pick their next machine from anywhere.

At this point in history, this knowledge is almost completely
useless. But if you're interested in this kind of stuff, look
for the phrase "Elder Days" on almost any computer related group.

Wikipedia has collected several resources about Baudot, if you're
interested...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

Bear
(feeling old, today)

.

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