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Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
51–55 of 55 posts
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#52Wow 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.
Hey I love the sound of that! Please publish it on GitHub so I can build it in C or whatever. I think it was the blanks in xxd that gave me the idea for how good it would be to just display them - Unicode!
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#53One more theory - it could be a tabulator or cursor symbol (for word processing applications).
I am pretty sure IBM's "DisplayWriter" word processor used the "small house" char for some kind of an indicator in the status line, maybe something to do with tabs. Here's a screenshot I found of DisplayWriter using that char: https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter_System
I did consider that, but the 1980 IBM Displaywriter uses a filled downwards triangle, not a house character, to indicate the center line [0].
But you're right that the Displaywriter inspited 1984 DisplayWrite DOS program [1] did use the house character for the same purpose. (Although, CP437 also included a filled downwards triangle character at 0x1F.)
[0]: https://youtu.be/YnU_woucebE?t=169
[1]: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/ibm_displaywrite.p...
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hey I love the sound of that! Please publish it on GitHub so I can build it in C or whatever. I think it was the blanks in xxd that gave me the idea for how good it would be to just display them - Unicode!
I’ll have to dig it up and put it out there for you. It’s actually already on GitHub but buried in another completely unrelated repo (networking tools where I was looking at undecoded binary dumps of network traffic).
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#55I 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).
It's most likely meant to be Delta, as used in mathematics and science (which is typically smaller than the Greek letter). Not only is the Delta in the Greek character similarly shaped, but Lambda is similarly distorted in the greek character set. Likewise, A, N, V, Y, K (arguably), and W (arguably) are distorted.
But then, why is it one pixel above the baseline?