22 Feb
2004
22 Feb
'04
8:30 p.m.
On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Michael Sokolov wrote:
Well, OK, I would argue that the keyboard of a 19th
century typewriter is still
an ASCII entry device. Any time you produce letter 'A', even if you handwrite
HARRUMPH! Young punks.
Never heard of Hollerith?
The early user interfaces were all point and grunt.
Then they developed icons (and built pyramids).
Later on, they went to phoneme based character sets in
most of the world, with a few exceptions, such as Kanji.
It was only thirty years ago that they switched from EBCDIC, etc.
to ASCII.
And twenty years ago that they did a really great job
of going back to sub-literate point and grunt computing.
(remember, "Hey! We were watching that!")
ASCII is an imperceptible ethnocentric blip in history.
Although ASCII had an impressive rate of acceptance,
its longevity does not compare even with Hollerith,
EBCDIC, Murray, or Baudot.
UNICODE is NOT the answer; but it is at least an
acknowledgement of the existence of the problem.
On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, John Lawson wrote:
Are you smoking/sniffing/drinking/huffing any of a
variety of
Substances that may (or may not) have sufficient psychological and
psychotropic manifestations that would permit you to deliver the several
screeds that you have vouschafed unto us???
... AND NOT SHARING??!??