Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
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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?
#2One more theory - it could be a tabulator or cursor symbol (for word processing applications).
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#3I 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).
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#4Wow, it really goes in depth on the topic, in the beginning I was like "wtf am I even reading this" and after a while I was hooked by the writing style, the depth of the research and also the design of the website. Really, really cool.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#5One more theory - it could be a tabulator or cursor symbol (for word processing applications).
Yup. That's what it looks like to me as well
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#6Linked in this article is VileR's excellent website https://int10h.org/>. In fact, it is linked 8 times in this article. If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend following those links. VileR's site is probably the best resource we have today that preserves the various PC OEM fonts from a bygone technological era -- an era that lives on in the memories of those of us who first encountered these machines early in life.
I'm genuinely in awe of the time and effort VileR has poured into recovering each font, and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction, and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent countless hours there comparing different OEM fonts, and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#7because they couldn't fit a large house into 8x16.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#8Really good article! Personally it has me convinced that the 0x7F character was originally meant to be a delta, but whoever drew it did a poor enough job that it made other teams at IBM think it was supposed to be a house. As the article says, when you look in the PC BIOS source listing, there's a comment saying "DELTA" next to where the bitmap for the 0x7F character is defined. https://github.com/philspil66/IBM-PC-BIOS/blob/main/PCBIOS.A...
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#9One more theory - it could be a tabulator or cursor symbol (for word processing applications).
That's what I always assumed it was, too.
Re: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
#10One 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...
