Top all-time · #5243
Tom Jennings
Personal blog · sensitiveresearch.comhistoryhardware
Tom Jennings's personal blog at sensitiveresearch.com covers history and hardware. Since 2015, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Tom Jennings's archive of historical character-code and computing documents. Commenters link it for the 1963 and 1968 ASCII standards and for ASCII history; the comments are mostly bare links or citations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/index.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-06
- /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-06
What Hacker News says?
https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... ASCII was developed in 1963 by a guy from IBM while Bell was at DEC. However since Bell has worked in the PDP's UART, it's possible...
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG
on “Gordon Bell has died”Submitted Circuit building: stop using antique parts (2014) as a story · 197 points
HN discussionhttps://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... Looks to me like serendipity - they thought 8 bits would be wasteful, they didnt have a need for that many characters.
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page7.JPG
on “UTF-8 is a brilliant design”Submitted Ping Stick as a story · 112 points
HN discussionASCII is, as people have pointed out, a 7-bit code, so it can hold only 128 characters. When they added _ and ^ to it in 01967, they had to remove the ← and ↑ characters from ASCII-1963⁂. So there was no space for any of the characters —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English . "National variants" of ASCII might allocate space to some of them, or to other characters like ñ which are even more c…
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/index.html
on “Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side”Submitted Circuit building: stop using antique parts (2014) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionVideo demonstration is available for download here: http://sensitiveresearch.com/Ping%20stick/images/wall,%20edg...
Comment linking /Ping%20stick/images/wall,%20edge%20emphasis.mov
on “Ping Stick”Submitted An annotated history of some character codes (control characters explained) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSimilar to Hugh Stegman (operator of Ominous Valve) is Tom Jennings: http://sensitiveresearch.com/
Comment linking /
on “WLW: 700 kHz, 500 kW, 100% modulation, no limiter (2000)”> There’s no real structure to which codes are in which categories, they’re all just kind of randomly scattered Not exactly. Although the 1967 revision muddled things a little, they are grouped by kind:¹ A8.2 The controls that were selected logically fall into four groups: (1) Transmission controls (2) Format effectors (3) Device controls (4) Information separators Within each group the controls are ordered so that…
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/index.html
on “ASCII control characters in my terminal”https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... has the full 1963 standard (12 jpg’s) I find it interesting to read the section on considerations. They, for example, mention that COBOL is supported, but ALGOL isn’t, explain how the standard could be extended for use for “European alphabets” (they could use the 5 values after Z and the one before A for additional letters) or “base 12 numeric digits” (…
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/index.html
on “Internet Standard #80: ASCII Format for Network Interchange (1969)”https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/#NOTE... > From Eric Fischer: You may also be interested to know that RFC 20 […] is, aside from minor typos and the opening paragraph, essentially a word-for-word copy of the X3.4-1968 standard, presumably without the knowledge or consent of ANSI.
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/
on “Internet Standard #80: ASCII Format for Network Interchange (1969)”Not exactly. The first edition form 1963 only specified a subset of modern ASCII. https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-... Bits 6 and 7 were mostly unassigned. Obviously, lowercase characters didn't exist in 1963, they were invented later and that's why they added them later. The version from 1968 is basically what we consider to be ASCII. /s From what I remember, I think this was due to compa…
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG
on “Internet Standard #80: ASCII Format for Network Interchange (1969)”https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/index.html has even older (back to ~1950s) media
Comment linking /Archive/index.html
on “Floppy.museum – Museum of Obsolete Media”In general, I agree with your conclusions. However, I found it interesting that this document made no mention of ASCII or other 7-bit character sets. Especially since the first version of the standard (X3.4-1963, no lowercase) was already several years old at that point. https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-...
Comment linking /Archive/CharCodeHist/X3.4-1963/index.html
on “IBM Confidential: System/360 File Organization [video]”
