From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ches@cheswick.com (William Cheswick) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 11:53:04 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <82A10288-02BE-4898-A4A1-E863286785D4@cheswick.com> > On 17Jan 2017, at 10:14 AM, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote: > > the 1970s. The 6400/6600/7600 family were definitely in the octal > world. Initially, the character set was 6-bit, with one character > reserved as an escape to mean that the next 6-bit chunk was to be > included, giving a 12-bit representation that added support for > lowercase letters We called it “half-ASCII”, escaping with codes 74B and 76B. As far as I recall, it only worked on some versions of some of the timesharing systems in some modes. We never had a lower case print chain at Lehigh, SO ALL OUR OUTPUT WAS IN UPPER CASE. And don’t get me started on 63- vs 64- character set. The availability of ASCII on other operating systems was a great improvement in my life. And certain neurons still remember crap like 22B is R in display code. ches -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: