Re: If you were John Connor wouldn't you be inspecting Cameron for

On Mar 7, 4:55=A0pm, "Adam H. Kerman" <a...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> I guess the question I should have asked was if those two obscure
> characters were in use in computer languages in the mid 1950's.

They may have been for future use, or mathematical notations.

ASCII came out in 1962.  There's a  Western Union Technical Bulletin
available on the web with an article about it if anyone is
interested.  As an aside, WU wasn't thrilled about it, it was quite
happy with its 5-bit Baudot*.

About that time Teletype Corp came out with the model 33 ASR which
used it.  But I think most business communications, via WU Telex or
AT&T TWX stayed with Baudot until the end.  To this day I believe deaf
TTY communications use Baudot.

I'm not sure what the original ASCII character set was.  There were
some changes as it was used in the 1960s to what is used today.

There was mention of a "backspace".  I don't recall Teletype machines
having a backspace capability.  If you wanted to overtype, you had to -
return- to the beginning of a line (no linefeed), then space out as
desired.

The designers of ASCII included many things, such as lower case, which
would not be needed for many years.  It's possible certain functions
and characters were included for that reason.  Given how well ASCII
works for us today 45 years later, they did a pretty good job on it.

I miss the functionality of cntl-G, the bell.  On my PC, if I write a
simple program to issue that, it will beep, but nowhere else.


* IMHO, this attitude hurt WU in the later 1960s as data communication
speeds went way up and WU was still mostly 100 baud Baudot, despite
investment in microwave and other broadband facilities.  While WU was
state of the art in the late 1940s, that was obsolete and not
competitive 25 years later.