17 Feb
2025
17 Feb
'25
6:26 a.m.
On Feb 17, 2025, at 7:45 AM, Frank Leonhardt via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 16/02/2025 21:21, David Wade via cctalk wrote:
I've never seen an ASCII terminal that was missing square brackets. But in theory
those codes were "national use" codes, and for non-English language use they
would be redefined as A with umlaut or stuff like that. This is why RSTS/E at some point
introduced parentheses as alternates for the square brackets it had always used as
directory name delimiters. For us in the US that was never interesting.
The problem was fixed fairly well with the introduction of the DEC Multinational Character
Set, which later morphed into ISO Latin-1 (with the curious omission of the oe ligature)
and later the various other Latin-<n> sets. And the problem was solved completely
with Unicode.
paul
On 16/02/2025 20:51, paul.kimpel--- via cctalk
wrote:
I was assuming it was a reference particular machines that had limited ASCII. Square
brackets were missing from a lot of keyboards, but not the IBM PC, which turned up with
"everything" and function keys too. Before then I felt I was lucky when I had
lower case. And don't start on ASCII hard copy terminals. I don't understand -- ASCII had only two
versions, 1963 and 1967, and both had square brackets. The IBM PC used ASCII, but had
nothing to do with its standardization.
I can't find the context for this, but
it was early EBCDIC devices which lacked square brackets, and there was a big debate in
the academic world where to put them in the code page...
https://x3270.miraheze.org/wiki/Why_are_the_square_bracket_characters_displ…
... and here is a 3270 keyboard....
https://sharktastica.co.uk/directory?id=94OROEAU