15 Mar
2002
15 Mar
'02
7:55 a.m.
On 15-Mar-2002 John Lawson wrote:
John F. Auwaerter, 76, of Park Ridge, was a pioneer in
the
telecommunications industry who was instrumental in the development of
the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or the ASCII
computer language.
ARG! Why call ASCII an "computer langauge"?
The code was the first 8-bit standard code that
allowed characters, such
as those found on a keyboard, to be represented by the same codes on
many different kinds of computers.
Wasn't ASCII orignally 7-bit?
"That was a major change in standardization for
the telecommunications
industry," said Sylvan Silberg, a fellow former research engineer at
Teletype Corp. The code was developed in the 1960s through Mr.
Auwaerter's involvement an Institute of Electrical Engineers committee,
Silberg said.
"He traveled all over the world defining what this code would represent.
This is the code that is still used in PCs today," Silberg said.
Huh?! All over the world, but didn't seem to stray to a
non-english-speaking country. ASCII serves very poorly for those of us
who need accents.
-Philip