
Emojis, or Why Can't I Just Paste the Hotdog? - ethernetsalad
http://blog.thingsima.de/2016/08/08/emojis-or-why-cant-i-just-paste-the-hotdog/
======
dalke
> "It was initially designed for telecommunications, having spawned from
> telegraph code so it’s a bit odd that such an old idea would be incorporated
> in computers"

I don't think ASCII was designed for telecommunications. I think it was
designed as a data processing standard from the beginning. Here's a quote from
a 1960 CACM article, concerning X3.2 committee which developed ASCII, from
[http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-
hist/SurveyCodedCharacterRepre...](http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-
hist/SurveyCodedCharacterRepresentation_Bemer_CACM_Dec1960.pdf) :

> Technical Committee 97 of the International Standards Organization (ISO) is
> concerned with standards in data processing. The American Standards
> Association holds the secretariat of this committee. Sectional Committee X3
> of A.S.A. is responsible for national data processing standards in the
> U.S.A. ...

> The primary aims in publishing this chart are: l) To indicate to the
> information processing industry why standardization is vital in this area.
> ...

Eric Fischer, who is an HN reader, wrote this paper on the development of
ASCII, at
[http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf](http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf)
:

> These codes were used for decades before the appearance of computers and the
> changing needs of communications required the design and standardization of
> a new code. ...

Page 11 show how computers were the impetus behind ASCII: "communications
equipment would otherwise invariably use a version of International Telegraph
Alphabet No. 2, while computer makers would not even consider using it because
of the nonsensical order of its characters when sorted by their binary codes
(Figure 29)."

It's hard to read through Fischer's paper and conclude that ASCII "was
initially designed for telecommunications".

> "have fallen into the same trap that quite a number of American computer
> scientists fell into"

The ASCII designers were well aware of the needs of non-American use. Page 24
of Fischer's paper shows the input from German, Portuguese, and Russian
speakers as ASCII became an ISO standard - the _I_ being "International".
Elsewhere shows input from other still other countries.

