ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control characters (1968) [pdf]

https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-17_1st_edition_november_1968.pdf

by susam • 2 years ago

93 20 2 years ago

ggm• 2 years ago

Didn't catch on. ^C did, mapping to ascii equivalent just worked. "Hat" for control key was a winner.

9dev• 2 years ago

That confused me a lot when I started using Linux as a teenager. There wasn’t really an explanation anywhere, some commands would just show ^Something and assume you’d know what to do. When I finally figured out, the terminal made a lot more sense.

nikeee• 2 years ago

I'm curious: Is there still a free copy available from ECMA in switzerland? I mean, besides this scanned one. I just love printed stuff.

rbanffy2• 2 years ago

Not sure if free, but they should be able to provide any current standard.

tuukkah• 2 years ago

Interesting how they didn't use hexadecimal the same way as we do today, instead writing e.g. the code position 0x7F as 7/15.

TheAceOfHearts• 2 years ago

It would be interesting to read how they decided on these specific symbols, or if that knowledge is lost to time. I feel like sometimes standards would benefit from including a non-normative section explaining a bit more of the reasoning behind specific design decisions.

hetman• 2 years ago

Apparently this later became ISO 2047 and most of these characters are mapped into Unicode (with the exception of a few which have reasonable substitutes).

I was wishing for something like this recently so I'm genuinely pleased to know this exists.

rbanffy2• 2 years ago

Which ones aren't? I think I've seen them all in during my work with adding legacy characters to Unicode 13 and now 16.

userbinator• 2 years ago

These didn't get much use as far as I know (and many computers of the 60s still used 6-bit characters and not anything resembling ASCII), but I think CP437 became the de-facto representation of the low characters for most of the 80s through at least the mid 90s.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

PCs weren't yet a dominant computing platform for most of the 80s.

zeitgeistcowboy• 2 years ago

Character 7 is still a bell! I always loved that when you printed ASCII character 7 on old machines it made a sound instead of printing a character.

qsort• 2 years ago

Old machines? Type "print(chr(7))" into the latest Python REPL and see what happens :)

teddyh• 2 years ago

  print("\a")

FabHK• 2 years ago

A bit of background on those control characters and what they mean:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes

dartos• 2 years ago

Why have symbolic and alphabetic, I wonder

dusted2• 2 years ago

I think the idea was to be able to communicate them on devices that did not have the symbols (which turned out to be pretty much all of them)

proneb1rd• 2 years ago

TIL. The burger icon (LF) was invented in 1968

seoulbigchris• 2 years ago

If anyone is old enough to remember Joe Campbell's "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications", there was an excellent ASCII wall chart, which used these symbols for the control characters.

dusted2• 2 years ago

It's amazingly interesting to me that these exist and yet, do not seem to be commonly available in ascii fonts

gschizas• 2 years ago

Interesting. With a few exceptions (namely, BS/HT/LF/VT), these are identical on what the Amstrad CPC character set (https://archive.org/details/SOFT968TheAmstrad6128FirmwareMan...) looks like. Which was probably a copy from some other character set ROM.

ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control characters (1968) [pdf]

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