Unknown CDC unit , looks like a drum memory ?

[Frank McConnell]

On May 17, 2018, at 11:47, Fred Cisin wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 17 May 2018, Ed Sharpe via cctalk wrote:
>> yep we see them  but   we  did not  type them intentionally  
> 
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/13/we/
> 
>> may way to adjust  your  mail reader reader as  they do not  show up in   any of the  mail readers  we have access to.
>> Ed# 
> 
> If your email program is crapping, it is not the responsibility of everybody else to "adjust" their mail readers to filter out the crap.
> This group has been remarkably tolerant of NON-ASCII content.
> 
> Many already have configurations that do such filtering, and are not seeing all of the mess.
> Others just assume that your mail client, or your keyboard is BROKEN.
> Would cleaning the contacts of your space bar reduce the bounce and noise it produces?
> Perhaps also repair the rest of the punctuation keys, if the keyboard has any, and at least one of the shift keys.
> 
> That is assuming that it is a keyboard, and not a telegraph key, nor OCR of crayon drawings.

My guess is (and has been for a while) "dictated to Cortana".  And his Cortana is sometimes hard of hearing because the mic got buried under something.

We live in interesting times in which the future is here but not evenly distributed.  For many modern e-mail user programs, the default character set for plain text is no longer US-ASCII or some local national variation but Unicode.  And the e-mail composer works hard to notice that its user has typed a quotation mark so it can promote it into some other Unicode quotation mark (e.g. " gets turned into LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK).  It then gets sent as text/plain, but with UTF-8 encoding; and some but not all combinations of mail readers and display devices can show Unicode characters in UTF-8 encoding.

So if you insist on reading your e-mail with a VT100 or even an HP 700/92, some e-mail is looking funny and more will; but some of the newer terminal emulators (e.g. Terminal.app on macOS) are capable of displaying Unicode from a received UTF-8 stream, and that is why reports of success with Alpine vary: people running it from a terminal that understands UTF-8 see the non-breaking space characters as blanks, while those who run it from a terminal that understands only US-ASCII see them as something else.

Right at the moment I am using Apple Mail and it is one of those things that does character promotion, and sometimes I have uses for that.  I think I may have fixed this message, but that fixing is a conscious effort and takes some work to retype those quotation marks and move away from them with some care, and then check again before you send because sometimes it re-scans and re-promotes.

-Frank McConnell