20 Nov
2018
20 Nov
'18
7:18 p.m.
This has not been a good few months for historical/vintage computer people
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/bozeman-founder-of-american-comp…
21 Nov
21 Nov
5:39 a.m.
If I might say so, Keremedjiev was one of the people in the 90's who helped
define "vintage computer" and who selected which computers were part of
its original pantheon (Altair, IMSAI,etc.). I recall his museum web site
was one of the first web sites about vintage computing along with Ira
Goldklang's TRS 80 site and a few others. I never made it there myself in
person. I hope someone keeps the museum going.
On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 11:16 PM Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
This has not been a good few months for
historical/vintage computer people
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/bozeman-founder-of-american-comp…
12:03 p.m.
I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi covers on it... sn 200? series....? we?
kept? sn #18
I was? at the? computer biz in those? days? so this was over? 26 years? ago.? Enjoyed?
our? visit.
?
Sad? to see? him? go...
?
scarry? to hear? of this? being? close to that age? also.
?
Good bye? George...
?
Ed#
?
In a message dated 11/21/2018 6:40:13 AM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
?
If I might say so, Keremedjiev was one of the people in the 90's who helped
define "vintage computer" and who selected which computers were part of
its original pantheon (Altair, IMSAI,etc.). I recall his museum web site
was one of the first web sites about vintage computing along with Ira
Goldklang's TRS 80 site and a few others. I never made it there myself in
person. I hope someone keeps the museum going.
On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 11:16 PM Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
This has not been a good few months for
historical/vintage computer people
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/bozeman-founder-of-american-comp…
12:24 p.m.
At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi
covers on it... sn 200? series....? we? kept? sn #18
Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
circumflex-A for you?
I see '?' all throughout your emails.
- John
1:17 p.m.
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that? ?does that?
In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
?
At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi covers
on it... sn 200? series....? we? kept? sn #18
Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
circumflex-A for you?
I see '?' all throughout your emails.
- John
1:46 p.m.
sounds like your nail program fault or setting.
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 John Foust via cctalk <jfoust at threedee.com; cctalk
at classiccmp.org> wrote:
At 03:17 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE wrote:
who knows? what mail program are you using that does
that?
A classic computer one, of course. Eudora 7.1 circa 2006.
- John
1:53 p.m.
Those chars c o me from microsoft i.e. I bet you are using Outlook
On Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 4:17 PM ED SHARPE via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org
wrote:
who knows? what mail program are you using that
does that?
In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi
covers on it... sn 200?
series....? we? kept? sn #18
Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
circumflex-A for you?
I see '?' all throughout your emails.
- John
2:19 p.m.
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
It is YOUR mail program that is "doing that"!!
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
>
>
> In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
>
> ?
> At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
>
>> I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi covers on it... sn 200?
series....? we? kept? sn #18
>
> Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
> circumflex-A for you?
>
> I see '?' all throughout your emails.
>
> - John
2:46 p.m.
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't.? I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill
2:55 p.m.
On 11/21/2018 5:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon
via cctalk wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
I see them, and have for a long time.
- j.
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill 
3:10 p.m.
On 21/11/2018 22:46, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> Ed,
> It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
> then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
>
> Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
> Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't.? I didn't see it until someone
replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
I see the extra spaces, which are non-break spaces. I think the reason
John was seeing uppercase A-circumflex characters is because Ed's email
is using UTF-8; however John's email client isn't respecting the header
that says so, and is using Western (ISO-8859-1). NBSP in UTF-8 is
A-circumflex in Western.
Amusingly, Bill's reply also contains a NBSP (after the full stop in
"don't".), which displays as A-circumflex when I change the coding in my
client.
--
Pete
Pete Turnbull
4:20 p.m.
wrong not everybody sees it this is the only list serve problems... I suppose modern
email programs either do not see or know what to do with the characters... please consider
using the delete key and not reading things frI'm me if it bothers,you
thanks ed#
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Pete Turnbull via cctalk <pete at dunnington.plus.com;
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 21/11/2018 22:46, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> Ed,
> It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
> then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
>
> Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
> Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't.? I didn't see it until someone
replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
I see the extra spaces, which are non-break spaces. I think the reason
John was seeing uppercase A-circumflex characters is because Ed's email
is using UTF-8; however John's email client isn't respecting the header
that says so, and is using Western (ISO-8859-1). NBSP in UTF-8 is
A-circumflex in Western.
Amusingly, Bill's reply also contains a NBSP (after the full stop in
"don't".), which displays as A-circumflex when I change the coding in my
client.
--
Pete
Pete Turnbull
5:04 p.m.
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
wrong not everybody sees it this is the only list
serve problems... I
suppose modern email programs either do not see or know what to do with
the characters... please consider using the delete key and not reading
things frI'm me if it bothers,you
thanks ed#
That is a very good hypothesis.
"Modern" (bordering on profanity in this list) email programs might insert
characters that we are not intended to notice in support of "features"
(also bordering on profanity). When they encounter those special
characters, they know to activate that "feature", and suppress their
display.
But email progams from "LAST MONTH" (prior to the "10 year rule"?) do
NOT
recognize, respect, nor understand those "modern" "control"
characters.
("Modern" companies, such as Microsoft, Apple, AOL, etc. deprecate the
use of any software or hardware that is not "current")
Email seems to be being handled like word processor file formats - what
happens when you try to load a document from a current version prograam
into a copy of a previous version of the program?
You would never know there was an issue if everybody that you associate is
using the same current programs.
Q: is line wrap ON or OFF in the program?
Q: is "format: flowed" ON or OFF?
Either/both might insert "non-breaking spaces".
These do not seem to be adequately documented in this context -
(differentiation between "bug" and "feature").
8:22 p.m.
not much adjustments... may be easier if you just bypass my messages?
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
wrong not everybody sees it this is the only list
serve problems... I
suppose modern email programs either do not see or know what to do with
the characters... please consider using the delete key and not reading
things frI'm me if it bothers,you
thanks ed#
That is a very good hypothesis.
"Modern" (bordering on profanity in this list) email programs might insert
characters that we are not intended to notice in support of "features"
(also bordering on profanity). When they encounter those special
characters, they know to activate that "feature", and suppress their
display.
But email progams from "LAST MONTH" (prior to the "10 year rule"?) do
NOT
recognize, respect, nor understand those "modern" "control"
characters.
("Modern" companies, such as Microsoft, Apple, AOL, etc. deprecate the
use of any software or hardware that is not "current")
Email seems to be being handled like word processor file formats - what
happens when you try to load a document from a current version prograam
into a copy of a previous version of the program?
You would never know there was an issue if everybody that you associate is
using the same current programs.
Q: is line wrap ON or OFF in the program?
Q: is "format: flowed" ON or OFF?
Either/both might insert "non-breaking spaces".
These do not seem to be adequately documented in this context -
(differentiation between "bug" and "feature").
22 Nov
22 Nov
8:45 a.m.
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
not much adjustments... may be easier if you just
bypass my messages?
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
Maybe it's because many of us don't use a point-and-drool interface that
would give the user the chance to skip the message before being forced to
read it.
Look, I get that you've decided that hundreds of people are wrong and it's
not your fault. How about we work on getting you to stop top posting
instead? ;)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
8:58 a.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "geneb via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "ED SHARPE" <couryhouse at aol.com>; "General Discussion:
On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2018 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: George Keremedjiev
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
And proofreading a bit before pressing 'send'...
not much adjustments... may be easier if you just
bypass my messages?
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
Maybe it's because many of us don't use a point-and-drool interface that
would give the user the chance to skip the message before being forced to
read it.
Look, I get that you've decided that hundreds of people are wrong and it's
not your fault. How about we work on getting you to stop top posting
instead? ;)
g.
---- 
23 Nov
23 Nov
9:31 a.m.
On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 07:20:25PM -0500, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
wrong not everybody sees it this is the only list
serve problems...
I suppose modern email programs either do not see or know what to do
with the characters... please consider using the delete key and not
reading things frI'm me if it bothers,you
thanks ed#
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
To me, the problem is not with your emails (or anybody else's from
this list), but the slow invasion performed by offending
software. Since you pressed space once, it should be entered as single
space, 0x20 in ASCII. If you pressed space twice, it should be entered
into email written by you as two 0x20 bytes, and this is what should
show on my side. My software receives some extra stuff from you, but
not in a consistent manner, i.e. some ASCII spaces are prepended with
extra two bytes and some not. I was not conscious about it - thought
you had some peculiar space pressing manner or text postprocessor
(like fmt) made double spaces in order to fit your lines into
130-characters width (because your lines were not folded at 79 or
anywhere close).
(In other words, it looks like everybody gets those extra bytes, only
some programs choose to not show them, which - for me - is another
problem and should be examined in due time).
If what you press and what is being sent out to your recipients
differs, then this is a problem, with potential security implications
(as I learn with some horror, just anything in modern computer can
turn against the owner, if he could be called owner at all). A
software that mangles your input is not a friend. It should be
terminated. Just MHO.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
21 Nov
21 Nov
4:23 p.m.
re blank spaces,yep they get in there...
ed#
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Pete Turnbull via cctalk <pete at dunnington.plus.com;
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 21/11/2018 22:46, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> Ed,
> It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
> then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
>
> Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
> Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't.? I didn't see it until someone
replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
I see the extra spaces, which are non-break spaces. I think the reason
John was seeing uppercase A-circumflex characters is because Ed's email
is using UTF-8; however John's email client isn't respecting the header
that says so, and is using Western (ISO-8859-1). NBSP in UTF-8 is
A-circumflex in Western.
Amusingly, Bill's reply also contains a NBSP (after the full stop in
"don't".), which displays as A-circumflex when I change the coding in my
client.
--
Pete
Pete Turnbull
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
4:33 p.m.
On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
kelly
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill
25 Nov
25 Nov
9:55 a.m.
seems only the? very old? ?mail programs? do not adapt? to all character sets??
In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
?
On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
kelly
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill
12:24 p.m.
New subject: e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)
Very old mail programs indeed have no understanding whatsoever of character sets or
encoding. They simply display data from the e-mail file on stdout or equivalent. If you
are lucky, the character set and encoding in the e-mail match the character set and
encoding used by your terminal.
The early-to-mid-1990s MIME work was in some part about allowing e-mail to indicate its
character set and encoding, because at that point in time there were many character sets
and multiple encodings. Before that, you had to figure them out from your
correspondent's e-mail address and the mess on your screen or printout.
And really it's not just about the mail program, it's about the host operating
system and the hardware on which it runs and which you are using to view e-mail.
Heavy-metal characters are likely to look funny on a terminal built to display US-ASCII
like an HP 2645. Your chances get better if the software has enough understanding of
various Roman-language text encodings and you are using an HP 2622 with HP-ROMAN8
character support and the connection between your host and terminal is eight-bit-clean.
But then you get something that uses Cyrillic and now you're looking at having another
HP 2645 set up to do Russian. And hoping your host software knows how to deal with those
character sets and encodings too!
-Frank McConnell
On Nov 25, 2018, at 9:55, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
seems only the very old mail programs do not adapt to all character sets?
In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
kelly
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill
3:32 p.m.
New subject: e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)
Most mail servers sending inbound messages to the list include the encoding
scheme in the header. The mailer program should process and translate the
email message body accordingly...in theory anyway. The set up and testing
of a sampling of encoding variations would reveal which interpreters were
missing in our particular list's relay process. Someone could create tests
with the most common 20 or so encoding schemes and a character set dump and
document the results etc. Anyone have the time for that? I dont really
think asking persons to fix their email program is the solution, it's a
mailing list fix/enhancement. I bet there is documentation on such a
procedure I can't imagine we are the first to encounter this problem. It's
fixable
B
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018, 3:24 PM Frank McConnell via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
Very old mail programs indeed have no understanding
whatsoever of
character sets or encoding. They simply display data from the e-mail file
on stdout or equivalent. If you are lucky, the character set and encoding
in the e-mail match the character set and encoding used by your terminal.
The early-to-mid-1990s MIME work was in some part about allowing e-mail to
indicate its character set and encoding, because at that point in time
there were many character sets and multiple encodings. Before that, you
had to figure them out from your correspondent's e-mail address and the
mess on your screen or printout.
And really it's not just about the mail program, it's about the host
operating system and the hardware on which it runs and which you are using
to view e-mail. Heavy-metal characters are likely to look funny on a
terminal built to display US-ASCII like an HP 2645. Your chances get
better if the software has enough understanding of various Roman-language
text encodings and you are using an HP 2622 with HP-ROMAN8 character
support and the connection between your host and terminal is
eight-bit-clean. But then you get something that uses Cyrillic and now
you're looking at having another HP 2645 set up to do Russian. And hoping
your host software knows how to deal with those character sets and
encodings too!
-Frank McConnell
On Nov 25, 2018, at 9:55, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
kelly
seems only the very old mail programs do not adapt to all character
sets?
In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
> On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill
3:47 p.m.
New subject: e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)
On 11/25/18 4:32 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
Most mail servers sending inbound messages to the list
include the
encoding scheme in the header. The mailer program should process
and translate the email message body accordingly...in theory anyway.
Most email handling programs don't need to bother with what the data is,
as they just move the data. This largely includes email list managers.
This really only becomes a concern if something is modifying part of the
message (data) as it moves through the system.
The set up and testing of a sampling of encoding
variations would reveal
which interpreters were missing in our particular list's relay process.
cctalk is using Mailman, and I'm fairly sure that Mailman does handle
this properly. Or if there is a bug it has likely been found &
resolved. In the event that a bug is found, I think that it would be
best to report it upstream to Mailman so they can fix it, and then
install the updates when they are released.
Someone could create tests with the most common 20 or
so encoding schemes
and a character set dump and document the results etc. Anyone have the
time for that?
I doubt that this is necessary.
Based on what I've seen, Mailman is handling the message (data) just
fine. It's passing the Ed's messages with the UTF-8 =C2=A0
(quoted-printable) encoded parts just fine.
I dont really think asking persons to fix their email
program is
the solution
I agree that it's asking an end user to fix their email client is the
most viable solution.
it's a mailing list fix/enhancement.
I disagree.
I'm not convinced that this is a problem in email.
I question how many people are seeing the symptoms -and- what email
client they are using.
If someone knowingly chooses to use an email client that doesn't support
UTF-8, then ?\_(?)_/? That's their choice. I just hope that they are
informed in their choice.
I bet there is documentation on such a procedure I
can't imagine we are
the first to encounter this problem. It's fixable
If you really do think that this is a problem with the mailing list, I'd
suggest bringing the problem up on the Mailman mailing list. Mark S. is
very responsive and can help people fix problems / configurations in
short order.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
4 p.m.
New subject: e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)
Hi? Frank? and? others-
Yea it? is? only here? ?we? have? the? problem. or? at leased this is the only? list?
serve that? does not? like? it.
?
I? wondered if? something? could be handled at the listserv? end? or? not? but I have
littleknowledge of list serves alas...
?
Sad? when people? ?spent? more? ?time? on characters? rather than? George the? ?museum
archivist that passed away.?
?
George? worked his? ass off to achieve what? he? did.
?
Google him? and? read? about? his? early days. You will be? surprised and? you might?
?find yourself? thankful? for? how easy? you? had? it.?
?
I did not? know? him? all that? well? but?I did? provide his? PDP-8? classic? with the?
plexis? when He was? first starting up It? was a? beauty and in the 200 serial number?
range as? I? remember. We kept? #18 classic? Plexi for? SMECC
?
I? had? not? planned on selling it? as? ?always? handy to have a? #2? for an offsite
display and you do not have to disturb the in-house? display but George seems? so? focused
and? intense on? making a? museum? too? so? who? could? say no to that? I? wish I? had.?
traveled to? see his? effort? up? close.?
?
Project this? week is? to? find? someone? one? with a UNIVAC? 422 or? ?the predecessor?
UNIVAC Digital trainer.? I can NOT BELIEVE I am fortunate enough? to be the only one?
?with a UNIVAC? 422'
?
That is all for now...? I? think? I? hear? ?a half of? turkey and leftover dressing in the
refrig? wailing to? be consumed.
?
Ed#? www.smecc.org?
?
?
?
In a message dated 11/25/2018 4:32:34 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
?
Most mail servers sending inbound messages to the list include the encoding
scheme in the header. The mailer program should process and translate the
email message body accordingly...in theory anyway. The set up and testing
of a sampling of encoding variations would reveal which interpreters were
missing in our particular list's relay process. Someone could create tests
with the most common 20 or so encoding schemes and a character set dump and
document the results etc. Anyone have the time for that? I dont really
think asking persons to fix their email program is the solution, it's a
mailing list fix/enhancement. I bet there is documentation on such a
procedure I can't imagine we are the first to encounter this problem. It's
fixable
B
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018, 3:24 PM Frank McConnell via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
Very old mail programs indeed have no understanding
whatsoever of
character sets or encoding. They simply display data from the e-mail file
on stdout or equivalent. If you are lucky, the character set and encoding
in the e-mail match the character set and encoding used by your terminal.
The early-to-mid-1990s MIME work was in some part about allowing e-mail to
indicate its character set and encoding, because at that point in time
there were many character sets and multiple encodings. Before that, you
had to figure them out from your correspondent's e-mail address and the
mess on your screen or printout.
And really it's not just about the mail program, it's about the host
operating system and the hardware on which it runs and which you are using
to view e-mail. Heavy-metal characters are likely to look funny on a
terminal built to display US-ASCII like an HP 2645. Your chances get
better if the software has enough understanding of various Roman-language
text encodings and you are using an HP 2622 with HP-ROMAN8 character
support and the connection between your host and terminal is
eight-bit-clean. But then you get something that uses Cyrillic and now
you're looking at having another HP 2645 set up to do Russian. And hoping
your host software knows how to deal with those character sets and
encodings too!
-Frank McConnell
On Nov 25, 2018, at 9:55, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
kelly
seems only the very old mail programs do not adapt to all character
sets?
In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
> On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill
4:45 p.m.
New subject: e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)
It's not a mailing list problem.? It's not even a mail problem. It's a
Mail User Agent problem.? It is a display problem.? It is up to the
users mail program to display the email as it was sent.? Unless the
user doesn't want to see anything in character sets other than
their favorite.? Nothing along the way should change anything
in an email message.? The endpoint should receive whatever the
beginning point sent out and either handle it or not.? But it is the
endpoints responsibility to try to display it accurately.? I often
send emails (and post on USENET) characters that are not a part
of ASCII or the English alphabet.? I certainly don't want someone
in between to modify what I send.
bill
On 11/25/18 7:00 PM, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
Hi? Frank? and? others-
Yea it? is? only here? ?we? have? the? problem. or? at leased this is the only? list?
serve that? does not? like? it.
I? wondered if? something? could be handled at the listserv? end? or? not? but I have
littleknowledge of list serves alas...
Sad? when people? ?spent? more? ?time? on characters? rather than? George the? ?museum
archivist that passed away.
George? worked his? ass off to achieve what? he? did.
Google him? and? read? about? his? early days. You will be? surprised and? you might?
?find yourself? thankful? for? how easy? you? had? it.
I did not? know? him? all that? well? but?I did? provide his? PDP-8? classic? with the?
plexis? when He was? first starting up It? was a? beauty and in the 200 serial number?
range as? I? remember. We kept? #18 classic? Plexi for? SMECC
I? had? not? planned on selling it? as? ?always? handy to have a? #2? for an offsite
display and you do not have to disturb the in-house? display but George seems? so? focused
and? intense on? making a? museum? too? so? who? could? say no to that? I? wish I? had.?
traveled to? see his? effort? up? close.
Project this? week is? to? find? someone? one? with a UNIVAC? 422 or? ?the predecessor?
UNIVAC Digital trainer.? I can NOT BELIEVE I am fortunate enough? to be the only one?
?with a UNIVAC? 422'
That is all for now...? I? think? I? hear? ?a half of? turkey and leftover dressing in
the refrig? wailing to? be consumed.
Ed#? www.smecc.org
In a message dated 11/25/2018 4:32:34 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
Most mail servers sending inbound messages to the list include the encoding
scheme in the header. The mailer program should process and translate the
email message body accordingly...in theory anyway. The set up and testing
of a sampling of encoding variations would reveal which interpreters were
missing in our particular list's relay process. Someone could create tests
with the most common 20 or so encoding schemes and a character set dump and
document the results etc. Anyone have the time for that? I dont really
think asking persons to fix their email program is the solution, it's a
mailing list fix/enhancement. I bet there is documentation on such a
procedure I can't imagine we are the first to encounter this problem. It's
fixable
B
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018, 3:24 PM Frank McConnell via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
> Very old mail programs indeed have no understanding whatsoever of
> character sets or encoding. They simply display data from the e-mail file
> on stdout or equivalent. If you are lucky, the character set and encoding
> in the e-mail match the character set and encoding used by your terminal.
>
> The early-to-mid-1990s MIME work was in some part about allowing e-mail to
> indicate its character set and encoding, because at that point in time
> there were many character sets and multiple encodings. Before that, you
> had to figure them out from your correspondent's e-mail address and the
> mess on your screen or printout.
>
> And really it's not just about the mail program, it's about the host
> operating system and the hardware on which it runs and which you are using
> to view e-mail. Heavy-metal characters are likely to look funny on a
> terminal built to display US-ASCII like an HP 2645. Your chances get
> better if the software has enough understanding of various Roman-language
> text encodings and you are using an HP 2622 with HP-ROMAN8 character
> support and the connection between your host and terminal is
> eight-bit-clean. But then you get something that uses Cyrillic and now
> you're looking at having another HP 2645 set up to do Russian. And hoping
> your host software knows how to deal with those character sets and
> encodings too!
>
> -Frank McConnell
>
> On Nov 25, 2018, at 9:55, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
>> seems only the very old mail programs do not adapt to all character
> sets?
>>
>> In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
> cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>>>> Ed,
>>>> It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
>>>> then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
>>>>
>>>> ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
>>>> everything that you send!
>>>> I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
>>>> inappropriate spaces.
>>>>
>>>> Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
>>>> Everybody? but you sees it.
>>>>
>>> I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
>>>
>>> copy of the offending text included.
>>>
>>>
>>> bill
>>>
>> same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
>>
>> kelly
>>
>
5:49 p.m.
New subject: e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)
On 2018-11-25 7:45 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
It's not a mailing list problem.? It's not
even a mail problem. It's a
Mail User Agent problem.? It is a display problem.? It is up to the
users mail program to display the email as it was sent.? Unless the
Did you really double space this email like a high school essay? Don't
see that every day.
--T
26 Nov
26 Nov
3:26 a.m.
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 12:17, ED SHARPE via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
seems only the very old mail programs do not adapt to all character sets?
Maybe so, Ed, but it's basic good manners to both (a) not make your
emails unnecessarily difficult for others to read, and (b) respect the
etiquette of the forum that you're posting in.
You do neither.
So, for instance, in your message to which I am replying, you:
#1 top-post, against general mailing-list etiquette
#2 fail to capitalise the sentence, against basic English rules
#3 insert unnecessary double-spaces into "the very", "old mail",
"programs do", and "adapt to".
*And*
#4 _You_ appear to have some "very old mail program" (to use your own
phrase) because it is screwing up your posting _and_ screwing up
double spaces.
So it is you causing the problems here, I'm sorry to say.
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
4:04 a.m.
#4 _You_ appear to have some "very old mail program" (to use your own
phrase) because it is screwing up your posting _and_ screwing up double
spaces.
There are no "double spaces" but for some reason he has a space and a UTF-8
non-breaking space next to each other. Most odd...
It looks like the mail client is the AOL webmail client. Headers say:-
Message-Id: <1674dba424c-1ec3-549b at webjas-vad199.srv.aolmail.net>
X-MB-Message-Source: WebUI
X-MB-Message-Type: User
X-Mailer: JAS DWEB
Dave
So it is you causing the problems here, I'm sorry
to say.
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
21 Nov
21 Nov
7:14 p.m.
some blank spaces whereas us 2 instead of one is some times bad mr. hand
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
It is YOUR mail program that is "doing that"!!
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
>
>
> In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
>
> ?
> At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
>
>> I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi covers on it... sn 200?
series....? we? kept? sn #18
>
> Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
> circumflex-A for you?
>
> I see '?' all throughout your emails.
>
> - John
7:33 p.m.
if I type an extra space I am sure every one sees it. but the chars not everyone sees
them.
what I do figure us the older email programs are not accepting of all charter sets? (
dunno if I am using the right term)
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
It is YOUR mail program that is "doing that"!!
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
>
>
> In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
>
> ?
> At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
>
>> I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi covers on it... sn 200?
series....? we? kept? sn #18
>
> Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
> circumflex-A for you?
>
> I see '?' all throughout your emails.
>
> - John
22 Nov
22 Nov
4:55 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
At 10:33 PM 21/11/2018 -0500, ED SHARPE wrote:
if I type an extra space I am sure every one sees it.
but the chars not everyone sees them.
what I do figure us the older email programs are not accepting of all charter sets? (
dunno if I am using the right term)
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
Ah ha! Mystery explained. I'm another who sees funny characters where Ed's mails
contain "c2 a0".
This is the UTF-8 encoding of a 'no-break space' character, which is NOT in the
original ASCII set.
See https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect/hex/c2/a0
I see them because I'm using an old email client - Eudora 3 (1997.) I stick with this
specifically
_because_ it doesn't understand UTF-8 or any other non-ASCII coding, especially in the
header, and
hence simply ignores any executables in the headers or email body. Which makes it totally
virus proof,
unlike Microsoft's intentionally open-backdoor junk like Outlook. And most other email
'modern wonders.'
Eudora barely even understands html in emails, and I'm fine with that. Also I have it
configured to
dust-bin any incomimg mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of
time-wasting.
Anyway, I was wondering how Ed's emails (and sometimes others elsewhere) acquired that
odd corruption.
Answer: Ed's email util (AOL Mobile Mail, and probably various other 'content
enhanced' email clients)
interpret the user typing space twice in succession, as meaning "I really, really
want there to be a space
here, no matter what." So it inserts a 'no-break space' unicode character,
which of course requires a
2-byte UTF-8 encoding. Then adds a plain ASCII space 0x20 just to be sure.
Personally I find it more interesting than annoying. Just another example of the gradual
chaotic devolution
of ASCII, into a Babel of incompatible encodings. Not that ASCII was all that great in the
first place.
It's also interesting that even on cctalk, where you'd think everyone would be
aware of the differences
between ASCII and later 'extensions', low level coding schemes, and the
desirability of sticking to common
standards, some are not.
Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough. I don't know how you got the idea people might miss
seeing a
single space, and so you need to type two or more. But it isn't so. The normal
convention in plain
text is one space character between each word. And since plain ASCII is hard-formatted,
extra spaces
are NOT ignored and make for wider spacing between words. Which looks very odd,
even if
your mail utility didn't try to do something 'special' with your unusual user
input.
Btw, I changed the subject line, because this is a wider topic. I've been meaning to
start a conversation
about the original evolution of ASCII, and various extensions. Related to a side project
of mine.
But first, I'm having a problem with some portion of cctalk posts going missing, ie I
don't receive all messages.
The ratio seems to vary day to day. Sometimes no obvious missing, sometimes a lot.
Still don't know why, or how to fix this. Any suggestions?
Guy
On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Fred Cisin <cisin at
xenosoft.com> wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
who?? knows??? ??what?? mail program?? are?? you
using that?? ??does that?
It is YOUR mail program that is "doing that"!!
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
who?? knows??? ??what?? mail program?? are?? you
using that?? ??does that?
>
>
> In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
>
> ??
> At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
>
>> I?? sold?? him my?? extra classic 8?? with the plexi covers on it... sn 200??
series....?? we?? kept?? sn #18
>
> Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
> circumflex-A for you?
>
> I see '??' all throughout your emails.
>
> - John
23 Nov
23 Nov
3:12 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 01:55, Guy Dunphy via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Also I have it configured to
dust-bin any incomimg mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of
time-wasting.
That's English-language cultural snobbery. I'm a native Anglophone but
I live in a non-English speaking country, Czechia.
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. It can cope
with some Western European letters needed for Spanish, French etc.,
but not even enough for the Norwegian letter ``?''. So I can type the
name of the district of Prague I'm in -- Karl?n -- and you'll probably
see that, but the street name, I am guessing not.
"Krizikova" is usually close enough but it's not correct. Those
letters are important. E.g. "s?rov?" means cheesy, but "syrov?" means
raw. That's a significant difference. It matters to me and I'm not
even Czech and don't speak it particularly well...
So if you tried to mail me something at work -- the address I normally
use, for instance for the Alphasmart Dana Wireless on the way to to me
from Baltimore right now -- and you get a reply saying
"package for
[streetname] undeliverable" in the subject -- you'd just
reject it.
That's basically discriminating against people who don't speak your
language, and in my book, that's not OK.
Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough.
Look, we haven't even been able to get him to quote correctly, so I
suspect changing his typing habits is right out!
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
4:52 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 12:12:32PM +0100, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
Worse than that, it's *American* ignorance and cultural snobbery which also
affects various English-speaking countries. The pound sign is not in US-ASCII,
and the euro sign is not in ISO-8859-1, for example.
Amusingly, peering through my inbox in which I have mail in both Dutch and
English, the only one with a UTF-8 subject line is in English. It was probably
composed on a Windows box which "helpfully" turned a hyphen into an en-dash.
On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 01:55, Guy Dunphy via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
[...]
Also I have it
configured to dust-bin any incomimg mail containing UTF-8
chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of time-wasting.
That's
English-language cultural snobbery. I'm a native Anglophone but I live
in a non-English speaking country, Czechia.
25 Nov
25 Nov
2:42 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/23/18 5:52 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
Worse than that, it's *American* ignorance and
cultural snobbery which
also affects various English-speaking countries.
Please do not ascribe such ignorance with such a broad brush, at least
not without qualifiers that account for people that do try to respect
other people's cultures.
The pound sign is not in US-ASCII, and the euro sign
is not in ISO-8859-1,
for example.
Well, seeing as how ASCII, the /American/ Standard Code for Information
Interchange, is inherently /American/, I don't personally fault it for
not having currency symbols for other languages / regions.
Instead, I consider ASCII to be a limited standard. Hence why so much
effort has gone into other standards to overcome this, and other,
limitation(s).
I do not know for sure, but I'm confident that other character sets
don't have characters / glyphs from other languages.
I'm sure that there is room for a discussion of why ASCII is used as the
underlying character set for network services and the imposition that it
imposes on international friends and colleagues.
Amusingly, peering through my inbox in which I have
mail in both Dutch
and English, the only one with a UTF-8 subject line is in English. It
was probably composed on a Windows box which "helpfully" turned a hyphen
into an en-dash.
I'm trying to NOT search my mailbox.
I'd be more curious about the number of bodies that contain UTF-8 or
UTF-16 that can encode more characters / glyphs. It's my understanding
that without some special quite modern extensions, non-ASCII is shunned
in headers, including the Subject: header.
P.S. Resending from the correct email address. ? A recent Thunderbird
update broke the Correct-Identity add-on. :-(
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
2:51 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/25/18 5:42 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
On 11/23/18 5:52 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A. Trilingual.
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A. Bilingual.
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A. American.
OK, it's a joke. (I'm American and speak 4 languages.)
bill
Worse than that, it's *American* ignorance
and cultural snobbery
which also affects various English-speaking countries.
Please do not ascribe such ignorance with such a broad brush, at least
not without qualifiers that account for people that do try to respect
other people's cultures.
3:26 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/25/18 3:51 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks three
languages?
A. Trilingual.
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A. Bilingual.
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A. American.
Monolingual.
OK, it's a joke. (I'm American and speak 4
languages.)
I've heard it before. I know there are a LOT of monolingual people in
the world that don't live in the U.S.A. But I'll guess that percentage
wise, the U.S.A. is probably up there for monolingual people.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
3:44 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
It was thus said that the Great Bill Gunshannon via cctalk once stated:
On 11/25/18 5:42 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
As an American, a friend of mine from Sweden (who himself speaks at least
three languages) considered me multilingual. Of course, my other languages
are BASIC, Assembly, C, Forth ...
I even heard of a high school in Tennessee who said computer languages
fulfill the "foreign language requirements" ... who'da thunk?
On 11/23/18 5:52 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk
wrote:
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A. Trilingual.
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A. Bilingual.
Q.? What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A. American. Worse than that, it's *American* ignorance
and cultural snobbery
which also affects various English-speaking countries.
Please do not ascribe such ignorance with such a broad brush, at least
not without qualifiers that account for people that do try to respect
other people's cultures.
OK, it's a joke. (I'm American and speak 4
languages.)
-spc (Who speaks English and perhaps a dozen words in German, but
plenty of computer languages ... )
3:51 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Nov 25, 2018, at 15:44, Sean Conner wrote:
I even heard of a high school in Tennessee who said
computer languages
fulfill the "foreign language requirements" ... who'da thunk?
I have been told that in the 1960s taking a course in FORTRAN programming fulfilled the
foreign language requirement at UC Berkeley.
-Frank McConnell
4:46 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sun, 25 Nov 2018, Frank McConnell via cctalk wrote:
I have been told that in the 1960s taking a course in
FORTRAN
programming fulfilled the foreign language requirement at UC Berkeley.
Not currently, and I have some doubt about then.
But, there are conflicting staatements.
One section requires that it be a MODERN language, but with specific
exceptions for ASL and "classical languages, such as Latin and Greek".
Is FORTRAN considered modern enough?
There are still MANY schools arguing about whether to accept ASL (American
Sign Language, as used by Deaf people). I would think that therefore, BSL
(British Sign Language) should qualify.
What about APL? Although its structure is fairly straight-forward, it
does, indeed, have a unique character set.
5:02 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 04:46:50PM -0800, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
[...]
Is FORTRAN considered modern enough?
[...]
What about APL? Although its structure is fairly
straight-forward,
it does, indeed, have a unique character set.
To supply this train of thought with some numbers:
- my copy of Common Lisp HyperSpec claims 978 symbols (i.e. words) on
its alphabetical index; many words have modifiers (a.k.a. keyword
options, with default values) which increases the number at least
twofold, IMHO, if one agrees that each combo should be counted as
different word, to which I would say yes
- I have read somewhere that Japanese pupil after graduating from
elementary school is supposed to know 1000 kanjis by heart (there
is a standardised set, I have a book)
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
5:34 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
To supply this train of thought with some numbers:
- my copy of Common Lisp HyperSpec claims 978 symbols (i.e. words) on
its alphabetical index; many words have modifiers (a.k.a. keyword
options, with default values) which increases the number at least
twofold, IMHO, if one agrees that each combo should be counted as
different word, to which I would say yes
- I have read somewhere that Japanese pupil after graduating from
elementary school is supposed to know 1000 kanjis by heart (there
is a standardised set, I have a book)
Would those "modifiers of words" qualify as ADJECTIVES?
The Japanes phonetic alphabets, Katakana and Hirigana, have 46 letters
each, almost twice that with diacritics.
I have heard that Japanese Kanji has more than 50,000 words/characters
(for which 16bits would fit, but be a little risky). But, that in common
usage, 1100 to 2000 words comprise most of common usage. Wikipedia says
that as of 2010, the student requirement is 2136.
Japanese Kanji and Chinese have substantial overlap, but there is no way
that you could squeeze both into 16 bits, without leaving out important
stuff.
Therefore, for use with current computers, 32 bits would be needed.
Some games can be played with mixing sizes by doing things like setting
high bit, for 128 7 bit characters plus 32768 15 bit characters, and
2147483648 31 bit characters.
6:07 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/25/2018 6:34 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
REAL COMPUTERS USE 18 BITS... RUNS
BEN.
To supply this train of thought with some
numbers:
- my copy of Common Lisp HyperSpec claims 978 symbols (i.e. words) on
? its alphabetical index; many words have modifiers (a.k.a. keyword
? options, with default values) which increases the number at least
? twofold, IMHO, if one agrees that each combo should be counted as
? different word, to which I would say yes
- I have read somewhere that Japanese pupil after graduating from
? elementary school is supposed to know 1000 kanjis by heart (there
? is a standardised set, I have a book)
Would those "modifiers of words" qualify as ADJECTIVES?
The Japanes phonetic alphabets, Katakana and Hirigana, have 46 letters
each, almost twice that with diacritics.
I have heard that Japanese Kanji has more than 50,000 words/characters
(for which 16bits would fit, but be a little risky).? But, that in
common usage, 1100 to 2000 words comprise most of common usage.
Wikipedia says that as of 2010, the student requirement is 2136.
Japanese Kanji and Chinese have substantial overlap, but there is no way
that you could squeeze both into 16 bits, without leaving out important
stuff.
Therefore, for use with current computers, 32 bits would be needed.
Some games can be played with mixing sizes by doing things like setting
high bit, for 128 7 bit characters plus 32768 15 bit characters, and
2147483648 31 bit characters.
7:59 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
> Therefore, for use with current computers, 32 bits
would be needed.
> Some games can be played with mixing sizes by doing things like setting
> high bit, for 128 7 bit characters plus 32768 15 bit characters, and
> 2147483648 31 bit characters.
On Sun, 25 Nov 2018, ben via cctalk wrote:
REAL COMPUTERS USE 18 BITS... RUNS
BEN.
Alas, "current" computers use 8, 16, 32.
They totally fail to understand the intrinsic benefits of 9, 12, 18, 24,
and 36 bits.
26 Nov
26 Nov
4:28 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 07:59:13PM -0800, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
[...]
Alas, "current" computers use 8, 16, 32.
They totally fail to understand the
intrinsic benefits of 9, 12, 18, 24, and 36 bits.
Oh go on then, I'm curious. What are the benefits? Is it just that there are
useful prime factors for bit-packing hacks? And if so, why not 30?
8:26 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 4:28 AM Peter Corlett via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 07:59:13PM -0800, Fred Cisin
via cctalk wrote:
[...]
As I understand it, 36 bits was used as it could represent a signed 10
digit decimal number in binary; the Frieden 10 digit calculator was the
"gold standard" of banking and financial institutions, so to compete in
that market, you computer had to be able to match the arithmetic standards.
-- Charles
--
X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
Alas, "current" computers use 8, 16,
32. They totally fail to understand
the
intrinsic benefits of 9, 12, 18, 24, and 36 bits.
Oh go on then, I'm curious. What are the benefits? Is it just that there
are
useful prime factors for bit-packing hacks? And if so, why not 30?
2:13 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/26/2018 9:26 AM, Charles Anthony via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 4:28 AM Peter Corlett via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I say 20 bits needs to be used more often.
Did anything really use all the control codes in ASCII?
Back then you got what the TTY printed.
Did any one ever come up a a character set for ALGOL?
Ben.
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 07:59:13PM -0800, Fred
Cisin via cctalk wrote:
[...]
As I understand it, 36 bits was used as it could represent a signed 10
digit decimal number in binary; the Frieden 10 digit calculator was the
"gold standard" of banking and financial institutions, so to compete in
that market, you computer had to be able to match the arithmetic standards.
-- Charles
Alas, "current" computers use 8, 16,
32. They totally fail to understand
the
intrinsic benefits of 9, 12, 18, 24, and 36 bits.
Oh go on then, I'm curious. What are the benefits? Is it just that there
are
useful prime factors for bit-packing hacks? And if so, why not 30?
25 Nov
25 Nov
5:55 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
ASL is? ?quite? different than? English... you can sign in English or? you can sign in
ASL? The? ASL? has a different sentence structure. When I? was? first learning? about?
the? Deaf Teletype? revolution? (We have a collection of? a diverse group of? TTY both?
mechanical and? CRT and portable? and ...? I would? correspond? via? email? with a young?
person that? sold? us? ?some ttys? and wondered? why it? was almost? a different?
sentence? structure, almost? like? Yoda? but? if? you? look at? both closely? not? really?
the? exact? same.? Hard? to? explain... but? English and ASL? utilize? 2? different?
?Sentence structuring ... or? so it? appears? to me.
?
If? you? learn? ASL and Signing? well there is a? good need? for? excellent interpreters
out there.
?
And? yes,? always? looking for? ANYTHING? related to the? history of? TTY? and other?
assertive? communications? devices.
?
Ed#
?
?
In a message dated 11/25/2018 5:46:55 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
?
There are still MANY schools arguing about whether to accept ASL (American
Sign Language, as used by Deaf people). I would think that therefore, BSL
(British Sign Language) should qualify
2:42 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/23/18 4:12 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
That's English-language cultural snobbery.
I don't think I'd go that far.
I'd suspect it's an unfortunate false positive of a spam filtering
technique that Guy uses.
Does the technique have some negative side effects? Sure.
Are said side effects intentional? I doubt it.
I'm a native Anglophone but I live in a
non-English speaking country,
Czechia.
I bet you see all sorts of things that I'm ignorant of.
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?
It can cope with some Western European letters needed
for Spanish,
French etc., but not even enough for the Norwegian letter ``?''. So
I can type the name of the district of Prague I'm in -- Karl?n --
and you'll probably see that, but the street name, I am guessing not.
Would you please provide an example? (I'm curious if my email client
will display things properly.) Feel free to pick any example that you
like so that you don't have to reveal information you might want to keep
private.
"Krizikova" is usually close enough but
it's not correct. Those letters
are important. E.g. "s?rov?" means cheesy, but "syrov?" means
raw. That's a significant difference.
Oh my. I had no idea that accent characters made such a difference. But
I consider that to be my personal ignorance living in the U.S.A. I do
NOT think it's anybody's fault by my own. I'll defend others if someone
tries to say that their native / local regional norm is the problem.
It matters to me and I'm not even Czech and
don't speak it particularly
well...
Fair enough.
So if you tried to mail me something at work -- the
address I normally
use, for instance for the Alphasmart Dana Wireless on the way to to
me from Baltimore right now -- and you get a reply saying "package for
[streetname] undeliverable" in the subject -- you'd just reject it.
That's basically discriminating against people who don't speak your
language, and in my book, that's not OK.
I will say that I think everybody has their own individual prerogative
to filter email as they see fit. They just need to know that they are
doing and own the fact that they might be causing unintentional harm.
P.S. Resending from the correct email address. ? A recent Thunderbird
update broke the Correct-Identity add-on. :-(
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
2:53 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sun, 25 Nov 2018 at 23:42, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> 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.
I bet you see all sorts of things that I'm
ignorant of.
It's been enlightening!
Some I was ready for.
E.g. In French or Spanish, both of which I can speak to some extent,
letters like ? or ? are not seen as separate letters: French would
call them a-acute, an a with an acute accent. ? is a c with a cedilla.
Etc.
But in Swedish/Norwegian/Danish -- I speak basic Norwegian and
rudimentary Swedish -- ? and ? and ? and so on are not a or o with
accents on: they are _different letters_ that come at the end of the
alphabet.
Czech is like that. ? and ? and ? and many more that my Mac can't
readily type are _extra letters_ which come after the unmodified form
in the alphabet.
Without them, you can't write correct Czech. It's worse than writing
English without the letter E.
Usually you can guess but not always.
Byt means flat, apartment; b y-acute t means the verb "to be".
You can probably work that out, but you can't always. A restaurant
menu would be hopelessly corrupted as both "raw" and "with cheese"
are
quite likely.
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? Would you please provide an example?
Sure, my office street name: K?i??kova
(I'm curious if my email client
will display things properly.)
K, r ha?ek, i, z ha?ek, i acute, k o v a.
A hacek is like an upside down circumflex: ^
Also known as a caron.
Oh my. I had no idea that accent characters made such
a difference. But
I consider that to be my personal ignorance living in the U.S.A. I do
NOT think it's anybody's fault by my own. I'll defend others if someone
tries to say that their native / local regional norm is the problem.
Oh yes. It's quite a minefield.
Czech keyboards have so many extra letters, the *numbers* are on shift
combinations!
I will say that I think everybody has their own
individual prerogative
to filter email as they see fit. They just need to know that they are
doing and own the fact that they might be causing unintentional harm.
P.S. Resending from the correct email address. ? A recent Thunderbird
update broke the Correct-Identity add-on. :-(
Well yes.
I believe Mr Corlett here rejects all mail from gmail.com -- except mine... ;-)
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
3:06 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/25/18 2:53 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 25 Nov 2018 at 23:42, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I routinely get Turkish and Greek spam in my mailbox--and I've gotten
Cyrillic-alphabet stuff as well.
Shrug. We all live on the same planet.
--Chuck
I bet you see all sorts of things that I'm
ignorant of.
It's been enlightening!
3:11 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/25/18 6:06 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 11/25/18 2:53 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
I live in the US and while I see less of it now than I used to,
at the University I used to get SPAM in Korean, Chinese,
Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and a couple of time
even Amharic.? Thus the reason ASCII is no longer the
"standard".
bill
On Sun, 25 Nov 2018 at 23:42, Grant Taylor via
cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I routinely get Turkish and Greek
spam in my mailbox--and I've gotten
Cyrillic-alphabet stuff as well.
Shrug. We all live on the same planet.
I bet you see all sorts of things that I'm
ignorant of.
It's been enlightening!
4:27 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
We have a tendency to be remarkably ethnocentric. When you apply for a
job, do you send them a copy of your RESUME?
There is an exit on 280 for "La Canada" road.
For most European languages (I did say MOST), an 8 bit extended ASCII
could be adequate.
"Recently" (1981), I was disappointed in IBM's character extensions for
the 5150. We got smiley faces, but not even pound-sterling nor Yen!
16 bits would presumably be adequate for designing a character set for
most phonetic alphabets. (I did say MOST).
When I got my Epson HC-20's (like the HX-20, but including Katakana), and
my Epson RC-20 (wristwatch, Z80 like, with RAM, ROM, and serial port)
I started to try to learn a little Japanese. I didn't get very far, but I
did at least learn the sounds of Katakana, and could sound out words
written in it (a LOT of computer materials use Katakana for non-Japanese
words, such as "monitor")
But, full inclusion of pictographic languages (Kanji, etc.) would require
more than 16 bits.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
26 Nov
26 Nov
4:45 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 03:06:29PM -0800, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
[...]
I routinely get Turkish and Greek spam in my
mailbox--and I've gotten
Cyrillic-alphabet stuff as well.
I had started to get slightly paranoid about the fact that there was a sudden
increase in Dutch-language spam and wondered how they had figured out my
physical location. On reflection, it's probably just that I now receive enough
legitimate-ish email that the Bayesian filter has adjusted and no longer
assumes that the correct response to Dutch text is "dat kan niet".
25 Nov
25 Nov
4 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/25/18 3:53 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
It's been enlightening!
:-)
Some I was ready for.
E.g. In French or Spanish, both of which I can speak to some extent,
letters like ? or ? are not seen as separate letters: French would call
them a-acute, an a with an acute accent. ? is a c with a cedilla. Etc.
If they are not seen as separate letters, then do their meaning's
change? Or is the different accent more for pronunciation?
But in Swedish/Norwegian/Danish -- I speak basic
Norwegian and rudimentary
Swedish -- ? and ? and ? and so on are not a or o with accents on:
they are _different letters_ that come at the end of the alphabet.
I assume that they have different meanings (if that applies to letters)
and are uses as different as "A" and "q".
Czech is like that. ? and ? and ? and many more that
my Mac can't
readily type are _extra letters_ which come after the unmodified form
in the alphabet.
~twitch~
I don't even know how to properly describe something that visually looks
like letters (glyphs?) to me, but may be an imprecise simplification on
my part.
Without them, you can't write correct Czech.
It's worse than writing
English without the letter E.
Usually you can guess but not always.
Byt means flat, apartment; b y-acute t means the verb "to be".
You can probably work that out, but you can't always. A restaurant
menu would be hopelessly corrupted as both "raw" and "with cheese"
are quite likely.
Indeed.
Sure, my office street name: K?i??kova
K, r ha?ek, i, z ha?ek, i acute, k o v a.
I had to zoom my font to see enough detail in K?i??kova, but it does
look like things came through just like you describe. (They even made
it through my shell script that I use to re-flow text in replies.)
A hacek is like an upside down circumflex: ^
Also known as a caron.
ACK
Oh yes. It's quite a minefield.
/me blinks and shakes his head.
Czech keyboards have so many extra letters, the
*numbers* are on shift
combinations!
~chuckle~
Well yes.
I believe Mr Corlett here rejects all mail from gmail.com -- except
mine... ;-)
?\_(?)_/?
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
26 Nov
26 Nov
12:44 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 01:00, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Yep. The Scandinavians have just 3 extras.
Czech has about a dozen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography
42 letters (!).
If they are not seen as separate letters, then do their meaning's
change? Or is the different accent more for pronunciation?
No, mainly, it changes alphabetical order and it makes asking questions tricky.
I see ? as an s-with-a-ha?ek and if I forget the ha?ek, I may
pronounce it as an s; ? = ``sh'' in English. ``?'' = "ch" in
English.
But that isn't how Czechs think. It's as impossible to misread or
mispronounce ? as S as it would be a nonsense to mispronounced ``T''
as ``M'' in English, so people find it very hard to guess what I mean.
To me, the diacritic modifies a letter, and in a word with 4 or 5
diacritics, they pile up in my head, I overload and may drop one or 2
of them. That renders the world as babel in Czech.
(I chose T/M because, incredibly to me, hand-written T in Russian is
written as M. Mind you, handwritten almost everything in Russian
becomes mmmmmMmmmMmmmmMmm. I can read printed Cyrillic but I find
handwritten stuff impossible.)
I assume that they have different meanings (if that
applies to letters)
and are uses as different as "A" and "q".
Yes.
Czech is like
that. ? and ? and ? and many more that my Mac can't
readily type are _extra letters_ which come after the unmodified form
in the alphabet.
~twitch~ I don't even know how to properly describe
something that visually looks
like letters (glyphs?) to me, but may be an imprecise simplification on
my part.
If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek, they're alphabets, so it's a letter.
I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe they're alphabets too.
I don't know anything about any Asian scripts except a tiny bit of
Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but
"character" is probably most common.
I had to zoom my font to see enough detail in
K?i??kova, but it does
look like things came through just like you describe. (They even made
it through my shell script that I use to re-flow text in replies.)
Good!
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
2:38 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 03:44, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek, they're
alphabets, so it's a letter.
Correct, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic are alphabets, so each
letter/character can be a consonant or vowel.
I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe
they're alphabets too.
Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Punic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, et cetera are
abjads, meaning that each character represents a consonant sound,
vowel sounds are either derived from context and knowledge of the
language, or can be added in via diacritics.
Devanagari and Thai (and Tibetan, Khmer, Sudanese, Balinese...) are
abugidas, where each character is a consonant-vowel pair, with the
"base" character being one particular vowel sound, and alternates
being indicated by modifications (example in Devanagari: "?" is "ka",
while "??" is "ki"; another example using Canadian Aboriginal
Syllabics "?" is "vai" whereas "?" is "vu").
I don't know anything about any Asian scripts
except a tiny bit of
Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but
"character" is probably most common.
Japanese actually uses three different scripts. Chinese characters
(the kanji script of Japanese, and the hanja script of Korean) are
logograms.
Japanese also has two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana where
each character represents a specific consonant vowel pair.
Korean hangul (or if you happen to be from the DPRK, chos?n'g?l) is a
mix of alphabet and syllabary, where individual characters consist of
sub parts stacked in a specific pattern. Stealing Wikipedia's example,
"kkulbeol" is written as "??", not the individual parts
"??????".
And now for even more fun, Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform (which
started with Sumerian, and then used by the Assyrians/Babylonians and
others) are a delightful mix of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic
characters. Because while China loathes you, Babylon has a truly deep
hatred of you and wishes to revel in your suffering.
Regards,
Christian
--
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.
27 Nov
27 Nov
4:44 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 23:39, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove
<captainkirk359 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 03:44, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Um. Yes. Thank you for that. Very informative, interesting, and I did
actually know most of it already but maybe others didn't.
The thing is that it's not actually very germane to the question I was
addressing, which was "what do you call the individual units in
different scripts?" I.e. "letter" vs "glyph" vs
"character" vs
"ideogram" vs "grapheme", etc... :-)
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek,
they're alphabets, so it's a letter.
Correct, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic are alphabets, so each
letter/character can be a consonant or vowel.
I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe
they're alphabets too.
Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Punic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, et cetera are
abjads, meaning that each character represents a consonant sound,
vowel sounds are either derived from context and knowledge of the
language, or can be added in via diacritics.
Devanagari and Thai (and Tibetan, Khmer, Sudanese, Balinese...) are
abugidas, where each character is a consonant-vowel pair, with the
"base" character being one particular vowel sound, and alternates
being indicated by modifications (example in Devanagari: "?" is
"ka",
while "??" is "ki"; another example using Canadian Aboriginal
Syllabics "?" is "vai" whereas "?" is "vu").
I don't know anything about any Asian scripts
except a tiny bit of
Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but
"character" is probably most common.
Japanese actually uses three different scripts. Chinese characters
(the kanji script of Japanese, and the hanja script of Korean) are
logograms.
Japanese also has two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana where
each character represents a specific consonant vowel pair.
Korean hangul (or if you happen to be from the DPRK, chos?n'g?l) is a
mix of alphabet and syllabary, where individual characters consist of
sub parts stacked in a specific pattern. Stealing Wikipedia's example,
"kkulbeol" is written as "??", not the individual parts
"??????".
And now for even more fun, Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform (which
started with Sumerian, and then used by the Assyrians/Babylonians and
others) are a delightful mix of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic
characters. Because while China loathes you, Babylon has a truly deep
hatred of you and wishes to revel in your suffering. 
30 Nov
30 Nov
4:59 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
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?
5:31 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk wrote:
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).
Depending on which question you are asking, . . .
Windows 3.1 definitely did support Hercules video. We had about 3 dozen
such machines (386SX) in the school student homework lab.
It also supported CGA, but initially didn't come with the driver, so it
would work if you upgraded from 3.0 to 3.1, or otherwise used the 3.0 CGA
driver.
In August 1991, I went to a Microsoft conference in Seattle. Although it
was the anniversary of the 5150, Bill Gates was making appearances on the
east coast, instead of being there.
They asked our opinion of the NEW flying ["dry rot" disintegrating] window
logo, and couldn't believe it that we did NOT love it.
I found out about, and got a copy of, a CD-ROM "International" Windows
3.0, with many languages, including Chinese! I loved being able to
install from CD, instead of boxes of floppies, and was glad that they were
at least trying to expand to the rest of the world.
They introduced Windows 3.1. But the borrowed Toshiba laptop that I had
with me had 1MB of contiguous RAM, but not A20 support, and 3.1 "NEEDED"
64K above 1MB for HIMEM.SYS, which "SOLVES the problem of not enough RAM".
3.1 also was the first product to force SMARTDRV.SYS. As soon as I got
home, I contacted the Win3.1 Beta program to tell them that write-cacheing
without a way to turn it off was a BIG problem. There was a bad spot on
the hard drive that I was installing it to that neither Spinrite nor
SpeedStor could find, but it consistently crashed the 3.1 installation.
But, with the forced write cacheing, there was NO possible way to recover.
(Without write-cacheing, you just rename the file that failed, and
manually install another copy of that one file)
I found the bad spot and put a SECTORS.BAD file there, and then was OK.
The Microsoft Beta program wanted cheerleaders, and ABSOLUTELY didn't want
any negative feedback nor bug reports, and insisted that the OS had no
responsibility to recover from nor survive hardware problems, and that
therefore it was not their problem. I told them that they would soon
have to do a recall (THAT was EXACTLY what happened with DOS 6.2x). They
did not invite me to participate in any more Betas.
I had a font editor that wouldn't tolerate 3.1, and quite a few XTs (no
A20), so I continued to keep Win 3.0 on a bunch of machines.
7:19 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, 30 Nov 2018, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
I found the bad spot and put a SECTORS.BAD file there,
and then was OK.
The Microsoft Beta program wanted cheerleaders, and ABSOLUTELY didn't want any
negative feedback nor bug reports, and insisted that the OS had no
responsibility to recover from nor survive hardware problems, and that
therefore it was not their problem. I told them that they would soon have to
do a recall (THAT was EXACTLY what happened with DOS 6.2x). They did not
invite me to participate in any more Betas.
Well, ATA drives at that time should have already had the capability to
remap bad blocks or whole tracks transparently in the firmware, although
obviously it took some time for the industry to notice that and catch up
with support for the relevant protocol requests in the software tools.
It took many years after all for PC BIOS vendors to notice that ATA drives
generally do report their C/H/S geometry supported (be it real or
simulated; I only ever came across one early ATA HDD whose C/H/S geometry
was real, all the rest were ZBR), so there is no need for the user to
enter it manually for a hard drive to work.
Of course the ability to remap bad storage areas transparently is not an
excuse for the OS not to handle them gracefully, it was not that time yet
back then when a hard drive with a bad block or a dozen was considered
broken like it usually is nowadays.
I had a font editor that wouldn't tolerate 3.1,
and quite a few XTs (no A20),
so I continued to keep Win 3.0 on a bunch of machines.
Did 3.1 support running in the real mode though (as opposed to switching
to the real mode for DOS tasks only)? I honestly do not remember anymore,
and ISTR it was removed at one point. I am sure 3.0 did.
Maciej
7:44 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
> I found the bad spot and put a SECTORS.BAD file
there, and then was OK.
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
Well, ATA drives at that time should have already had
the capability to
remap bad blocks or whole tracks transparently in the firmware, although
Not even IDE.
Seagate ST4096 (ST506/412 MFM) 80MB formatted, which was still
considered good size by those of us who weren't wealthy.
Of course the ability to remap bad storage areas
transparently is not an
excuse for the OS not to handle them gracefully, it was not that time yet
back then when a hard drive with a bad block or a dozen was considered
broken like it usually is nowadays.
Yes, they still came with list of known bad blocks. Usually taped to the
drive. THIS one wasn't on the manufacturer's list, and neither SpeedStor
nor SpinRite could find it!
There were other ways to lock out a block besides filling it with a
garbage file, but that was easiest.
And, I did try to tell the Microsoft people that the OS "should recover
gracefully from hardware errors". In those words.
I had a font
editor that wouldn't tolerate 3.1, and quite a few XTs (no A20),
so I continued to keep Win 3.0 on a bunch of machines.
Did 3.1 support running in
the real mode though (as opposed to switching
to the real mode for DOS tasks only)? I honestly do not remember anymore,
and ISTR it was removed at one point. I am sure 3.0 did.
4 Dec
4 Dec
6:01 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, 30 Nov 2018, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Sure! You did need a bad block list for such a drive though.
IIRC for MS-DOS the canonical way was to mark the containing cluster as
bad using a special code in the FAT. Both `format' and `chkdsk' were able
to do that, as were some third-party tools. That ensured that disk
maintenance tools, such as `defrag', didn't reuse the cluster for
something else as it could happen with a real file assignment of such a
cluster.
Hmm, interesting. I never tried any version of MS Windows on a PC/XT
class machine and the least equipped 80286-based system I've used had at
least 1MiB of RAM and a chipset clever enough to remap a part of it above
1MiB. And then that was made available via HIMEM.SYS.
What might be unknown to some is that apart from toggling the A20 mask
gate HIMEM.SYS also switched on the so-called "unreal mode" on processors
that supported it. These were at least the 80486 and possibly the 80386
as well (but my memory has faded about it at this point), and certainly
not the 80286 as it didn't support segment sizes beyond 64kiB. This mode
gave access to the whole 4GiB 32-bit address space to real mode programs,
by setting data segment limits (sizes) to 4GiB.
This was possible by programming segment descriptors in the protected
mode and then switching back to the real mode without resetting the limits
to the usual 64kiB value beforehand. This worked because unlike in the
protected mode segment register writes made in the real mode only updated
the segment base and not the limit stored in the corresponding descriptor.
IIRC it was not possible for the code segment to use a 4GiB limit in the
real mode as it would malfunction (i.e. it would not work as per real mode
expectations), so it was left at 64kiB.
According to Intel documentation software was required to reset segment
sizes to 64kiB before switching back to the real mode, so this was not an
officially supported mode of operation. MS Windows may or may not have
made use of this feature in its real mode of operation; I am not sure,
although I do believe HIMEM.SYS itself did use it (or otherwise why would
it set it in the first place?).
I discovered it by accident in early 1990s while experimenting with some
assembly programming (possibly by trying to read from beyond the end of a
segment by using an address size override prefix, a word or a doubleword
data quantity and an offset of 0xffff and not seeing a trap or suchlike)
and could not explain where this phenomenon came from as it contradicted
the x86 processor manual I had. I only learnt later on about this unreal
mode and that HIMEM.SYS used to activate it.
I don't know if the unreal mode has been retained in the x86 architecture
to this day; as I noted above it was not officially supported. But then
some originally undocumented x86 features, such as the second byte of AAD
and AAM instructions actually being an immediate argument that could have
a value different from 10, have become standardised at one point.
Maciej
Well, ATA
drives at that time should have already had the capability to
remap bad blocks or whole tracks transparently in the firmware, although
Not even IDE.
Seagate ST4096 (ST506/412 MFM) 80MB formatted, which was still considered
good size by those of us who weren't wealthy. Of course the
ability to remap bad storage areas transparently is not an
excuse for the OS not to handle them gracefully, it was not that time yet
back then when a hard drive with a bad block or a dozen was considered
broken like it usually is nowadays.
Yes, they still came with list of known bad blocks. Usually taped to the
drive. THIS one wasn't on the manufacturer's list, and neither SpeedStor nor
SpinRite could find it!
There were other ways to lock out a block besides filling it with a garbage
file, but that was easiest. And, I did try to tell the Microsoft people that the
OS "should recover
gracefully from hardware errors". In those words.
I found switching to Linux a reasonable solution to this kind of customer
service attitude. There you can fix an issue yourself or if you don't
feel like, then you can hire someone to do it for you (or often just ask
kindly, as engineers usually feel responsible for code they have
committed, including any bugs). :)
Did 3.1
support running in the real mode though (as opposed to switching
to the real mode for DOS tasks only)? I honestly do not remember anymore,
and ISTR it was removed at one point. I am sure 3.0 did.
I believe that it did. I don't remember WHAT the program didn't like about
3.1, or if there were a real reason, not just an arbitrary limit.
I don't think that the Cordata's refusal to run on 286 was based on a real
reason.
But, the Win 3.1 installation program(s) balked at anything without A20 and a
tiny bit of RAM above 100000h I didn't have a problem with having a few
dedicated machines (an XT with Cordata interface, an AT with Eiconscript card
for postscript and HP PCL, an AT Win 3.0 for the font editor, a machine for
disk duplication (no-notch disks), order entry, accounting, and lots of
machines with lots of different floppy drive types.) I also tested every
release of my programs on many variants of the platform (after I discovered
the hard way that 286 had a longer pre-fetch buffer than 8088!)
10:20 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Tue, 4 Dec 2018 at 15:02, Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I don't know if the unreal mode has been retained
in the x86 architecture
to this day; as I noted above it was not officially supported. But then
some originally undocumented x86 features, such as the second byte of AAD
and AAM instructions actually being an immediate argument that could have
a value different from 10, have become standardised at one point.
I know, and was surprised that, v86 mode isn't supported in x86-64.
This caused major problems for the developers of DOSEMU.
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
5 Dec
5 Dec
10:11 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Tue, 4 Dec 2018, Liam Proven wrote:
In the native long mode, that is. If you run the CPU 32-bit, then VM86
works. I guess AMD didn't want to burden the architecture in case pure
64-bit parts were made in the future.
I don't
know if the unreal mode has been retained in the x86 architecture
to this day; as I noted above it was not officially supported. But then
some originally undocumented x86 features, such as the second byte of AAD
and AAM instructions actually being an immediate argument that could have
a value different from 10, have become standardised at one point.
I know, and was surprised that, v86 mode isn't supported in x86-64. This caused major problems for the developers of
DOSEMU.
And also for expansion-BIOS emulation, especially with graphics adapters
(which, accompanied by scarce to inexistent hardware documentation, made
mode switching even trickier in Linux than it already was). It looks like
fully-software machine code interpretation like with QEMU is the only way
remaining for x86-64.
Maciej
4 Dec
4 Dec
10:26 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018 at 02:00, Maciej W. Rozycki <macro at linux-mips.org> wrote:
Be assured there were enough IBM PC clones running
DOS around from 1989
onwards for this stuff to matter,
OK, fair enough. Thanks for the info!
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).
It did. Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lOGPQQlxT8
Screenshot:
http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2016/12/windows-30-multimedia-edition-e…
The difficult bit was Windows 3.0 on an 8088/8086 with VGA, I believe.
The VGA driver contained 80286 instructions because MS didn't imagine
anyone would want Win3 on such old PCs.
(This again shows that MS didn't believe Win3 would be such a big hit,
giving the lie to all the pro-OS/2 anti-MS conspiracy theories...
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2011/06/01/windows-3-0/
)
To run Win3 on an 8086 in VGA mode, you had to replace the CPU with an
NEC V20 or V30, as I heard it and faintly recall...
The driver did later get patched to work:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?35593-Windows-3-0-VGA-color-drive…
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
23 Nov
23 Nov
9:54 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 11:55:18AM +1100, Guy Dunphy via cctalk wrote:
[...]
I see them because I'm using an old email client - Eudora 3 (1997.)
I stick with this specifically _because_ it doesn't understand UTF-8
or any other non-ASCII coding, especially in the header, and hence
simply ignores any executables in the headers or email body. Which
makes it totally virus proof, unlike Microsoft's intentionally
Totally say totally.
open-backdoor junk like Outlook. And most other email
'modern
wonders.' Eudora barely even understands html in emails, and I'm
fine with that. Also I have it configured to dust-bin any incomimg
mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of
time-wasting.
[...]
But first, I'm having a problem with some portion of cctalk posts
going missing, ie I don't receive all messages. The ratio seems to
vary day to day. Sometimes no obvious missing, sometimes a lot.
Still don't know why, or how to fix this. Any suggestions?
Turn off trashing mails with Unicode in Subject and see if this solves
a problem?
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
10:01 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 18:54, Tomasz Rola via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Turn off trashing mails with Unicode in Subject and see if this solves
a problem?
*Loud laughter in the office*
Well _played_, sir!
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
10:27 a.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 07:01:17PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 18:54, Tomasz Rola via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Well, that was low hanging fruit. But if he indeed turns it off and
the problem is not gone, that will be a bit of puzzle. Will require
some way to compare mailboxes in search of pattern in missing
emails... Which may or may not be obvious... which will lead to more
puzzles... oy maybe I should have stayed muted and let others do the
job...
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
Turn off trashing mails with Unicode in Subject and see if this solves
a problem?
*Loud laughter in the office*
Well _played_, sir!
1:43 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
At 07:27 PM 23/11/2018 +0100, you wrote:
On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 07:01:17PM +0100, Liam Proven
wrote:
Yes, I should have pre-empted that one. But glad it gave someone a laugh.
On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 18:54, Tomasz Rola via
cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Well, that was low hanging fruit.
Turn off trashing mails with Unicode in Subject and see if this solves
a problem?
*Loud laughter in the office*
Well _played_, sir! But if he indeed turns it off and
the problem is not gone, that will be a bit of puzzle.
It's not related. My cctalk filter runs before the UTF-8 trash filter,
and I check the trashbin regularly.
Will require
some way to compare mailboxes in search of pattern in missing
emails... Which may or may not be obvious... which will lead to more
puzzles... oy maybe I should have stayed muted and let others do the
job...
Here's one check. See attached screen-cap of cctalk emails. Usually many per
day, but only one per day on the 15th & 16th Nov, none at all on the 17th.
Did the list actually go silent then? It's possible by random ebb and flow,
or maybe everyone was in shock over the awful Paradise fire death toll.
Which may be over 1000, unless a lot of people listed as missing do turn up.
Guy
25 Nov
25 Nov
2:44 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
On 11/23/18 11:27 AM, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
Well, that was low hanging fruit. But if he indeed
turns it off and the
problem is not gone, that will be a bit of puzzle. Will require some way
to compare mailboxes in search of pattern in missing emails... Which may
or may not be obvious... which will lead to more puzzles... oy maybe I
should have stayed muted and let others do the job...
I'd question modern anti-spam techniques like DMARC and DKIM. I'd
suggest checking the mailing list to see if there is any information
about bounces.
You can probably see crumbs of missing messages in message flow (likely
already happening), the References: & In-Reply-To: headers, and the list
archive.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
23 Nov
23 Nov
1:23 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
At 06:54 PM 23/11/2018 +0100, you wrote:
Ha, I knew someone would say that. But no, I do check the email trash bin
regularly (before emptying it) and so far no cctalk or cctech emails are
being diverted to there. My filter for them runs before the UTF-filter (last.)
I'm guessing it's an overly picky spam filter somewhere in the network
routes into Australia.
Guy
On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 11:55:18AM +1100, Guy Dunphy
via cctalk wrote:
[...]
Except it turns out some feel that rejecting UTF-8 is culturally insensitive.
I agree they have a point. But for my practical purposes, all the 'UTF-8 in
header'
messages that end up in my trash folder are all, always, spam. I do check.
(And now someone's going to start posting cctalk messages with UTF-8 in Subject,
just watch.)
I see them because I'm using an old email client - Eudora 3 (1997.)
I stick with this specifically _because_ it doesn't understand UTF-8
or any other non-ASCII coding, especially in the header, and hence
simply ignores any executables in the headers or email body. Which
makes it totally virus proof, unlike Microsoft's intentionally
Totally say totally. open-backdoor
junk like Outlook. And most other email 'modern
wonders.' Eudora barely even understands html in emails, and I'm
fine with that. Also I have it configured to dust-bin any incomimg
mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of
time-wasting.
[...]
But first, I'm having a problem with some portion of cctalk posts
going missing, ie I don't receive all messages. The ratio seems to
vary day to day. Sometimes no obvious missing, sometimes a lot.
Still don't know why, or how to fix this. Any suggestions?
Turn off trashing mails with Unicode in Subject and see if this solves
a problem?
25 Nov
25 Nov
9:52 p.m.
New subject: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev
Not to beat a dead horse, but I ran across "? ? ? " in a text file when
read via a web browser this evening and wanted to share my findings as
they seemed timely.
On 11/22/18 5:55 PM, Guy Dunphy via cctalk wrote:
Anyway, I was wondering how Ed's emails (and
sometimes others elsewhere)
acquired that odd corruption.
IMHO it's not corruption as much as it is incompatibility.
Answer: Ed's email util ? interpret the user
typing space twice in
succession, as meaning "I really, really want there to be a space here,
no matter what." So it inserts a 'no-break space' unicode character,
which of course requires a 2-byte UTF-8 encoding.
What I'm not sure of is how the 0xC2 0xA0 translates to 0xC3 0xA2 that
is the ? character.
I think that the 0xC2 0xA0 pair is treated as two independent
characters. Thus 0xC2 is "?", and 0xA0 is a non-breaking space.
I don't know what happens to the non-breaking space, but the ? and the
space (0x20) that is after 0xC2 0xA0 (three byte sequence being 0xC2
0xA0 0x20) is included and becomes "? " which is what we see in reply
text. (Encoded as 0xC3 0x83 0x20.)
So, arguably, improperly processed / translated text that results in
0xC3 0x83 0x20 / "? " should have been a non-breaking space followed by
a space.
This jives with both Ed's email and the document that I was reading that
prompted this email.
Then adds a plain ASCII space 0x20 just to be sure.
I don't think it's adding a plain ASCII space 0x20 just to be sure.
Looking at the source of the message, I see =C2=A0, which is the UTF-8
representation followed by the space. My MUA that understands UTF-8
shows that "=C2=A0 " translates to " ". Further, "=C2=A0
=C2=A0"
translates to " ".
Some of the reading that I did indicates that many things, HTML
included, use white space compaction (by default), which means that
multiple white space characters are reduced to a single white space
character. So, when Ed wants multiple white spaces, his MUA has to do
something to state that two consecutive spaces can't be compacted.
Hence the non-breaking space.
=C2=A0 quite literally translates to a space character that can't be
compacted. Thus "=C2=A0 =C2=A0" is really "<space>
<space>" or " ".
Multiple successive spaces will need to be a mixture of space and
non-breaking space characters.
So, the plain ASCII space 0x20 after (or before) =C2=A0 is not there
just to be sure.
Personally I find it more interesting than annoying.
Just another example
of the gradual chaotic devolution of ASCII, into a Babel of incompatible
encodings. Not that ASCII was all that great in the first place.
As stated in another reply, I don't think ASCII was ever trying to be
the Babel fish. (Thank you Douglas Adams.)
Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough. I don't know
how you got the idea
people might miss seeing a single space, and so you need to type two or
more.
I wondered if it wasn't a typo or keyboard sensitivity issue. I
remember I had to really slow down the double click speed for my grandpa
(R.I.P.) so that he could use the mouse. Maybe some users actuate keys
slowly enough that the computer thinks that it's repeated keys. ?\_(?)_/?
But it isn't so. The normal convention in plain
text is one space
character between each word.
The operative word is "convention", as in commonly accepted but not
always the case behavior. ;-)
And since plain ASCII is hard-formatted, extra spaces
are NOT ignored
and make for wider spacing between words.
It seems as if you made an assumption. Just because the underlying
character set is ASCII (per RFC 821 & 822, et al) does not mean that the
data that they are carrying is also ASCII. As is evident by the
Content-Type: header stating the character set of UTF-8.
Especially when textual white space compression does exactly that,
ignore extra white spaces.
Which looks very odd, even if your mail
utility didn't try to
do something 'special' with your unusual user input.
I frequently use multiple spaces with ASCII diagrams.
+------+
| This |
| is |
| a |
| box |
+------+
That will not look like I intended it with white space compression.
Btw, I changed the subject line, because this is a
wider topic. I've been
meaning to start a conversation about the original evolution of ASCII,
and various extensions. Related to a side project of mine.
I'm curious to know more about your side project.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
21 Nov
21 Nov
2:36 p.m.
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
who? knows??
Maybe George Keremedjiev would have known.
He was from the era of [several] standardized character sets, BEFORE
the denial responses of "Well, MY mail program can display the stuff thet
MY mail program creates, so everybody else's must be wrong!"
22 Nov
22 Nov
8:21 a.m.
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
who? knows?? ?what? mail program? are? you using that?
?does that?
In a message dated 11/21/2018 1:25:08 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
?
At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
It's not his email client that's the problem, it's yours. It
constantly
inserts weird characters between words. I see the same problem in Alpine,
and I've never seen the issue from any other sender.
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the plexi
covers on it... sn 200? series....? we? kept? sn #18
Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
circumflex-A for you?
I see '?' all throughout your emails.
21 Nov
21 Nov
3:34 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 02:24:55PM -0600, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
At 02:03 PM 11/21/2018, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
Myself, under mutt, I see doublespaces. But! I selected some of the
original text from Ed, c-pasted onto another console and...
$ echo "I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the" | hexdump -C
00000000 49 c2 a0 20 73 6f 6c 64 c2 a0 20 68 69 6d 20 6d |I.. sold.. him m|
00000010 79 c2 a0 20 65 78 74 72 61 20 63 6c 61 73 73 69 |y.. extra classi|
00000020 63 20 38 c2 a0 20 77 69 74 68 20 74 68 65 0a |c 8.. with the.|
0000002f
See? There are extra "c2 a0" bytes in front of some 0x20 spaces.
I wonder how did they get there?
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
I? sold? him my? extra classic 8? with the
plexi covers on it... sn 200? series....? we? kept? sn #18
Side question: What process is turning non-blanking spaces into ISO-8859-1
circumflex-A for you?
I see '?' all throughout your emails. 
4:11 p.m.
I spent six weeks at MSU Bozeman this past Summer integrating a
performance-boosting, wide-area network-distributed database enhancement to
an augmented reality project sponsored through the Western Transportation
Institute there. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the museum, which is a
couple of blocks from WTI, and I was working some weekend and Summer time
into my schedule to volunteer there. However, with George?s passing, that
means I?ll need to step up even more, despite the 6.5-hour round trip from
where I?m teaching STEM, including computing and robotics.
I started as one of the early senior docents at the Computer History Museum
when it was in the uninsulated metal Butler buildings across from Hangar
One at Moffett Field. Then I participated in the move to its current
location in Silicon Graphics? former international marketing building on
North Shoreline Blvd, followed by the opening of the R|Evolution exhibit.
I then worked on the exhibition of Babbage Difference Engine Design Number
Two, Serial Number Two, which I presented, operated, and maintained.
That?s real vintage computing, where the operator isn?t just the power
supply, but also provides critical timing as the clock, cranking steadily
despite a change in required force from a few pounds up to about 25 pounds
during each cycle!
All the Best,
Jim
On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 20:31 Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
This has not been a good few months for
historical/vintage computer people
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/bozeman-founder-of-american-comp…
1978
days inactive
1992
days old
77 comments
26 participants
participants (26)
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abuse＠cabal.org.uk -
aek＠bitsavers.org -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
bill.gunshannon＠hotmail.com -
billdegnan＠gmail.com -
captainkirk359＠gmail.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cctalk＠gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net -
charles.unix.pro＠gmail.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
couryhouse＠aol.com -
dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com -
fmc＠reanimators.org -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
guykd＠optusnet.com.au -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
jim.manley＠gmail.com -
js＠cimmeri.com -
kfergason＠gmail.com -
lproven＠gmail.com -
macro＠linux-mips.org -
mhs.stein＠gmail.com -
pete＠dunnington.plus.com -
rtomek＠ceti.pl -
spc＠conman.org -
toby＠telegraphics.com.au