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Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

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Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#41

Post by ratmice »

tdeck wrote: post #37
layer8 wrote: post #12

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…

I agree; I always thought of it as a kind of cursor / pointer symbol. I used to do high ASCII art (nothing to write home about) and became pretty familiar with CP437, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what the "little house" was going to be.

I notice that cp437 has enspace, so I wonder if enspace combined with the "small house", is used to indicate the insertion point, or position between two characters when producing error messages.

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#42

Post by crazygringo »

layer8 wrote: post #12

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…

That's what I thought too. And WordStar and WordPerfect predated this character set by a couple of years, and then MultiMate and Word after.

But googling screenshots of all of them, I can't find any use of this character in their rulers. It's all dots, numbers, and bracket symbols.

So I think the end of the article is right -- it's a delta triangle that, for various reasons, got corrupted into that shape:

> If even the actual Greek uppercase delta is, quite unmistakenly, rendered as a house, then the theory that DEL is just a badly formed uppercase Greek delta character with the bottom corners cut off (due to a lack of horizontal pixels) starts to seem more and more convincing.

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#43

Post by cratermoon »

layer8 wrote: post #12

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…

These are physical tab placement markers for IBM Selectric typewriters.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/176048131446

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#45

Post by reddalo »

crazygringo wrote: post #42
layer8 wrote: post #12

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…

That's what I thought too. And WordStar and WordPerfect predated this character set by a couple of years, and then MultiMate and Word after. But googling screenshots of all of them, I can't find any use of this character in their rulers. It's all dots, numbers, and bracket symbols. So I think the end of the article is right -- it's a delta triangle that, for various reasons, got corrupted into that shape: > If even t…

DEL = DELta

I think this explains why they chose to put it there, instead of one of the other free spaces. It's just too smart not to do it.

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#46

Post by crazygringo »

reddalo wrote: post #45
crazygringo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I thought too. And WordStar and WordPerfect predated this character set by a couple of years, and then MultiMate and Word after. But googling screenshots of all of them, I can't find any use of this character in their rulers. It's all dots, numbers, and bracket symbols. So I think the end of the article is right -- it's a delta triangle that, for various reasons, got corrupted into that shape: > If even t…

DEL = DELta I think this explains why they chose to put it there, instead of one of the other free spaces. It's just too smart not to do it.

Yup. There are also a ton of other Greek letters in row E used in math... and no uppercase delta, which you'd obviously want, even more than many of the others. The only reason they wouldn't have included it down there was because they already included it above, exactly because it's DELta.

It still doesn't answer why it's a short uppercase delta though... I can only guess there was a failure of communication somewhere between who chose the character set and who drew the pixels...

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#47

Post by neuroelectron »

reddalo wrote: post #45
crazygringo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I thought too. And WordStar and WordPerfect predated this character set by a couple of years, and then MultiMate and Word after. But googling screenshots of all of them, I can't find any use of this character in their rulers. It's all dots, numbers, and bracket symbols. So I think the end of the article is right -- it's a delta triangle that, for various reasons, got corrupted into that shape: > If even t…

DEL = DELta I think this explains why they chose to put it there, instead of one of the other free spaces. It's just too smart not to do it.

Along with the rectangular pixels of the resolutions of the time, I think this makes sense.

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#48

Post by trollbridge »

Back in the 1990s, my best friend at the time and I embarked on making computer games. He decided to make one for his dad, who was a baseball fan, including keying in statistics for all the players you could choose.

His computer was a PC-1 (5150) with CGA and 320K RAM (and a Microsoft mouse with green buttons and a steel ball, oddly enough), so he wrote the program in text mode. His dad used that computer to get through law school.

CHR$(127), as we called it, was used for home plate. He’s a doctor now.

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#49

Post by trollbridge »

keepamovin wrote: post #40

Wow this is a beautiful article. I love Code page 437 - my first experiences with computers used it. I made two little things that are a homage to the pixelated and "cyberpunk" "screaming electron" "information superhighway" glory that is IBM Code Page 437: 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 "blo…

I still have most of the 437 code points memorised. At one point, I made a simple program similar to xxd or od but which would dump the binary code ones in (Unicode) 437 representation instead of just dots. (NUL, space, and 0xFF are all blanks, so I used other Unicode code points for those.) A little bit similar to Base-437 above.

Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?

#50

Post by trollbridge »

fredoralive wrote: post #3

I seem to recall whether 0xE1 in codepage 437 is supposed to be a Greek lowercase beta (β) or a German sharp s (ẞ) is intentionally a bit fuzzy, so its perhaps they intended it to be both a delta and a dingbat. I'm not really sure if a house fits it that much, wouldn't a generic "house" symbol have a chimney (although obviously, it's hard to fit one in with such a low resolution).

437 had quite a few “dual use” characters which were drawn to be mathematical symbols, but could be used to render (some) Greek text (poorly). It’s also notorious for having some accent marks, but not enough to fully represent most Western European languages; basically just German and Swedish.

Rather amusingly it had a Pesetas symbol for Spanish currency and numero signs an and o for abbreviations… but not a full enough set of accented characters to write everyday Spanish.

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