

ASCII is 50 years old - bpierre
http://the60sat50.blogspot.fr/2013/06/monday-june-17-1963-ascii.html

======
nsns

         __  __                     __     
        /\ \/\ \  __               /\ \    
        \ \ `\\ \/\_\    ___     __\ \ \   
         \ \ , ` \/\ \  /'___\ /'__`\ \ \  
          \ \ \`\ \ \ \/\ \__//\  __/\ \_\ 
           \ \_\ \_\ \_\ \____\ \____\\/\_\
            \/_/\/_/\/_/\/____/\/____/ \/_/

~~~
mililani
I can't even figure out what that is supposed to say. I'm guessing, Hiee! ????

~~~
peter_l_downs
"Nice!" ?

~~~
mililani
Ahhhh...I see, said the blind man.

------
js2
I've probably consulted the ASCII(7) man page more frequently than any other,
and consistently for almost two decades now.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I'm embarrassed to admit that TIL there is a man page for ASCII. I wish I had
known this years ago.

~~~
breckinloggins
And on OS X at least, it gives you a path to a file. If I "cat
/usr/share/misc/ascii" on Mountain Lion, I get an ASCII table (in ASCII, of
course).

------
StefanKarpinski
Man, it would have been nice for printing numbers in bases greater than ten
(e.g. hex) if 0-9 had come right before A-Z.

~~~
breadbox
There's a well-documented reason for the placement of (nearly) every single
character in ASCII. Unfortunately, not all 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 stabler ASCII standard. But I guarantee
that it will give you a lot of historical perspective.

~~~
asmithmd1
Holy $h!7 - That book is 650 pages. That is a lot of history.

~~~
LowKarmaAccount
Amazon's information is incorrect. According to WorldCat and Google Books, the
book is 513 pages, not 650. Also, its copyright date should be 1980, not 1979.

~~~
kps
Since this is such a burning question — my copy is ©1980 and ends at page 513.
I am now desperate to see the 137 pages of shocking censored material from the
legendary 1979 edition.

------
jokoon
I wish there would be other ways to encode text, even phrases.

I once put a lot of time to gather a very short list of the most used english
words.

Why not encode a phrase with its grammar ?

~~~
AaronFriel
Because then you could never encode real works of literature that use esoteric
or non-standard grammar. Good luck encoding Huckleberry Finn with your system.

On the other hand, encoding smaller units reliably (phonemes, graphemes,
whatever is appropriate) and using compression over top of that usually gets
you really close to what you wanted, but with greater expressiveness. English
text compresses really fantastically well, so why overthink it?

------
stox
And the US Navy has finally decided allow use of lower case in messages.

------
mogrim
ASCII: what a disaster. As anyone who's ever had to program in any language
other than English will have discovered.

~~~
Avshalom
It's not that ASCII is a disaster. It the refusal to default to larger
encodings for so long after it became obviously useful (that is as soon as
computers stopped being one offs).

~~~
EvanAnderson
Bob Bemer, often cited as the "Father of ASCII", proposed escape sequences to
extend ASCII to handle larger encodings in 1960, pre-standardization.
[http://www.bobbemer.com/ESCAPE.HTM](http://www.bobbemer.com/ESCAPE.HTM)

------
nyar
And I still can't triforce

