character codes, was RE: Really stupid PDP assembler question

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 16:47, David V. Corbin wrote: I'm a bit skeptical of the printer-hardware answer. Printing calculators don't care about notation, only humans do. Historically, eg. before computers, characters were logically defined in six positions -- 5 for the "character" and one for the case (FIGS, LTRS, etc). Many early electronic representations of symbols used 6 bits to define the symbol set. (Why five? how many fingers you got?) In fact, word widths of computing machines were occasionally described in how many characters wide, a character being 6 bits. ALl this character notation crap was inherited from telecomm gear. Telecom gear (ttys, etc) were adapted to computers for i/o because they were cheap and plentiful and (sort of) easy to use, not the other 'way 'round. The other historic data paradigm was hollerith's cards, which IBM bought. Both were adapted to electronic computing use, neither was designed for it. http://wps.com/projects/codes/index.html