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Comment by kps

9 years ago

  > 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.

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.)