31–40 of 55 posts
This was a fantastic article. The ASCII art alone is worth a click.
Not to be confused with the Hotel token (which wouldn't fit in a character)
I assume that someone had to meet a deadline, they were probably responsible for half a dozen other more important features, and there was a bleary-eyed team meeting where Chet asked “Any idea better than Dave’s house thing?” A bunch of people disagreed, no one had a markedly better idea than house thing, and it was memorialized with no one in the room remotely comprehending it would affect billions of PCs for the next 40 years.
But exactly the same argument applies to the Greek fonts where something that looks even more like a house is unmistakably intended to be delta, since it sits between gamma and epsilon. They could have made that looks like a triangle, but didn't.
My first association for this symbol isn’t a house, but an indent marker, like here (“Right Indent Box” in particular): https://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/help/images/ruler.p... Or here as a tab stop in GeoWrite (in the top left, below the “file” menu): https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/commodore64/images/6/68/Ge... Some mechanical typewriters had physical markers/stops that looked similar. The best I could fin…
What I remember from my experiences with terminals and printers (the only display devices available at the time) from 1978-1980 was that the 0x7F character rendered as a checkered box. This correlates with (0xFF) Figure 5 in the article. This was common among all printers I worked with, Teletype, Epson, Okidata, TI, Printronix, and even IBM. Also all the Lear Siegler, Televideo, DEC, Hazeltine, terminals I used did s…
https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/the-origins-of-del-0x7f-and-i...
1. Endless scrolling random Code Page 437 text: https://o0101.github.io/random/ (but it seems to be broken indicated by an overabundance of the non-existent "block question mark". Code here in case anyone wants to submit a fix :) : https://github.com/o0101/random)
2. Base-437 - a way to encode any binary file into faithful-to-code-page-437-glyphs that you can nevertheless throw into HTML no problemo: https://browserbox.github.io/Base437/ This means, for instance, you can have a "data:image/png;base437,ëPNG♪◙→◙ ♪IHDR ◘♠ \r¿f ♦gAMA Åⁿa♣ cHRM z& Çä · ÇΦ u..." URI for an image. I just think it looks cool being able to see the content rather than base64 which hides it. Code: https://github.com/BrowserBox/Base437