Old ASCII (was: Re: Stupid CP/M question)

Bingo! Yes, there is. That's the other major change. There have been, I think, three major versions of ASCII. (Although ASCII seems to be a very clear-cut standard, the history becomes very intricate if you consider how ECMA, the US military, and possibly other standards bodies got involved. Also, I think the character code itself, and the devices that implemented it, influenced each other. So I don't know all the details.) First version - 1963 (?) - This only had uppercase; the control characters had slightly different names (which I don't have here -- sorry!) and code 176 octal was assigned to Escape. That's the reason why Hazeltine terminals have so much trouble with tildes, by the way. Second version - 1968 (?) - The one I mentioned. The same as ours except for the underline being a left arrow and the caret being an upward-pointing arrow. I think the control characters had their modern names Third version - when? - This is the version I grew up with and consider standard. It's the one found in zillions of ASCII charts. The standard hides some interesting details, though: - You are allowed to use some characters as accents by overstriking. They are ' ` ~ ^ " and (I think) , as a cedilla. - There are a couple of other deliberate ambiguities. The tilde can be an overline and ^ can be another representation for the PL/I-style logical not. (These ambiguities could be in another version -- I hope I'm not getting confused here.) Actually, I lied. There is a fourth version (it's an ISO standard or some- thing). And there are international variants too. But since the fourth verrsion is basically the same as the third version except for the names of control characters (all the separators are now numbered), I don't really consider it any different than the previous versions. -- Derek