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

From: Eric Fischer <eric_at_fudge.uchicago.edu>
Date: Tue Jan 12 10:31:35 1999

> From: "D. Peschel" <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>

> Second version - 1968 (?) - The one I mentioned. The same as ours except
> for the underline being a left arrow and the caret being an upward-pointing
> arrow. I think the control characters had their modern names

I don't think that's correct. The original (1963) version of ASCII
used an up-arrow and left-arrow instead of caret and underline, but
by the time of the proposed extension to lowercase (1965) these had
changed to their current shapes.

By the way, R. W. Bemer's article in the May, 1978 Interface Age seems
to indicate that he would have preferred that ^ and _ be used right
from the start, but that Teletype had already manufactured equipment
with the arrow symbols so that was how they appeared in the first
standard. There's no mention of this in the August, 1963 Communications
of the ACM, though.

eric
Received on Tue Jan 12 1999 - 10:31:35 GMT