Comment by TazeTSchnitzel
9 years ago
ASCII was very carefully designed.
One feature I like is that you can neatly cut out a 64-character 6-bit all-uppercase encoding (like DEC's) if you don't need lowercase.
Wikipedia covers some of the design choices here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Internal_organization
The 1963 ASCII standard also lists many of the design considerations.
http://worldpowersystems.com/archives/codes/X3.4-1963/index....
And if you take the digits from the 0x3X column and the non-digits from the 0x2X column (flipping one bit), you get 0123456789*+,-./ which is enough to write numbers and the basic arithmetic operators. This too was deliberate.
I thought the pattern was from 01000 to 11111 gives you ()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>? but I can see what you are talking about.
Yes and on keybord shift+1 becomes
The TRS-80s had the lovely feature that all of the punctuation above the digits were consistent with ASCII layout. shift-1 was !, as per usual, but also shift-2 was ", and ' was shift-7. On the Model I they even went so far as to make shift-0 produce a space! (On the Model III however, they reused shift-0 to toggle between uppercase and lowercase mode -- sort of a reverse caps-lock key.)
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Yes and on keybord shift+1 becomes
Here is a nice history of ASCII: https://github.com/ericfischer/ascii
Thank you!
For a more detailed look at the design decisions in ASCII and its predecessors, check out Character Coding Sets: History and Development by Charles Mackenzie, one of the best technical books I've ever read.