30 Nov
2018
30 Nov
'18
4:59 p.m.
On Sun, 25 Nov 2018, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
Don't know. But I suspect there weren't many PCs here before the
Velvet Revolution in 1989. Democracy came around the time of Windows
3.0 so there may not have been much of a commerical drive.
Be assured there were enough IBM PC clones running DOS around from 1989
onwards for this stuff to matter, and hardly anyone switched to MS Windows
before version 95 (running Windows 3.0 with the ubiquitous HGC-compatible
graphics adapters was sort of fun anyway, and I am not sure if Windows 3.1
even supported it; maybe with extra drivers).
Anyway MS-DOS 5.0 onwards had a complete set of code pages for various
regions of the world. For Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and other
European countries located towards the east and using a language with a
latin transcription code page 852 was provided. For France, Germany,
Spain, Nordic countries, etc. page 850 was provided. There were other
pages included as well, beyond the IBM's original page 437, including
Greek and Cyrillic, but I don't know the details. It's quite likely
Wikipedia has them.
Of course the HGC didn't support text mode character switching, however
ISA VGA clones started trickling in at one point too. I still have my ISA
Trident TVGA 8900C adapter from 1993 working in one of my machines, though
I have since switched to Linux.
NB my last name is also correctly spelled R??ycki rather than Rozycki,
and the two letters with the diacritics are completely different from and
have sounds associated that bear no resemblance to the corresponding ones
without, i.e. these are not merely accents, which we don't have in Polish
at all (Polish complicates this further in that the sound of `?' is the
same as the sound of `u' and the sound of `?' is the same as the sound of
`rz' (which is BTW different from where the two letters are written
separately), however the alternatives are not interchangeable and are
either invalid or change the meaning of a word, and many native Polish
speakers get them wrong anyway).
FWIW,
Maciej
For example, right now, I am in my office in
K?i??kova. I can't
type that name correctly without Unicode characters, because the ANSI
character set doesn't contain enough letters for Czech.
Intriguing. Is there an old MS-DOS Code Page (or comparable technique)
that does encompass the necessary characters?