Re: CAPS Fantasia
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> While we're fantasizing (boy, are WE geeks!), that would have been an
> interesting way for the characters to have been ordered in ASCII or EBCDIC
> ... think of how differently we might have done things! Of course, ORing
> with x'40' to uppercase wouldn't work any more. But I guess you could OR
> with x'01' instead, no? Or AND with x'FE' to lowercase? Hmm...
>
> /me wanders off to tinker with the time machine again; maybe this time it
> will work!
recent thread from a.f.c on ebcdic & ascii
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#26 A Complete History Of Mainframe Computing
that has a low of URL references ... why 360 became EBCDIC and not ASCII
EBCDIC and the P-BIT (The Biggest Computer Goof Ever)
http://www.bobbemer.com/P-BIT.HTM
other references from the same site:
HOW ASCII CAME ABOUT
http://www.bobbemer.com/ASCII.HTM
HOW ASCII GOT ITS BACKSLASH
http://www.bobbemer.com/BACSLASH.HTM
SIGNIFICANT ARTICLES ON ASCII
http://www.bobbemer.com/INSIDE-A.HTM
ASCII and the Mark of the Beast
http://www.bobbemer.com/666.HTM
ORIGIN OF THE ISO REGISTER FOR ASCII-ALTERNATE SETS
http://www.bobbemer.com/REGISTRY.HTM
from "EBCDIC and the P-BIT"
Who Goofed?
The culprit was T. Vincent Learson. The only thing for his defense is
that he had no idea of what he had done. It was when he was an IBM Vice
President, prior to tenure as Chairman of the Board, those lofty
positions where you believe that, if you order it done, it actually will
be done. I've mentioned this fiasco elsewhere
... snip ...
--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
des...@verizon.net
> zos...@GMAIL.COM (P S) writes:
>> While we're fantasizing (boy, are WE geeks!), that would have been an
>> interesting way for the characters to have been ordered in ASCII or EBCDIC
>> ... think of how differently we might have done things! Of course, ORing
>> with x'40' to uppercase wouldn't work any more. But I guess you could OR
>> with x'01' instead, no? Or AND with x'FE' to lowercase? Hmm...
>>
>> /me wanders off to tinker with the time machine again; maybe this time it
>> will work!
>
> recent thread from a.f.c on ebcdic & ascii
> http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009k.html#26 A Complete History Of Mainframe Computing
>
> that has a low of URL references ... why 360 became EBCDIC and not ASCII
>
> EBCDIC and the P-BIT (The Biggest Computer Goof Ever)
> http://www.bobbemer.com/P-BIT.HTM
...
> from "EBCDIC and the P-BIT"
>
> Who Goofed?
>
> The culprit was T. Vincent Learson. The only thing for his defense is
> that he had no idea of what he had done. It was when he was an IBM Vice
> President, prior to tenure as Chairman of the Board, those lofty
> positions where you believe that, if you order it done, it actually will
> be done. I've mentioned this fiasco elsewhere
Who else goofed?
Once again, IBM. When they introduced the IBM PC they had 2 choices,
use someone else's chip, hardware, and OS and go with ASCII, or do the more
logical thing.
The more logical thing was to use their own chip making facilities and
build a mini-mainframe. Just like Wang did with their Wang/VS 5.
The machine could have been EBCDIC and retained most of the SYS/360
instructions. Only I/O would have to be simplified for the chips being
made back then.
Of course, they should have never let another company gain rights to the
OS.
What was the downside to this path? The only one I see is eventual
competition of IBM against IBM. So ultimately, greed at IBM destroyed
IBMs monopoly on computers.
At least, that's the way I see it.
Patrick Scheible
The IBM PC was a pretty late entrant into the PC market. ASCII was
already an established standard in most of the rest of the computing
world -- all the micros, lots of everything else. The younger crowd
made fun of IBM for having their own character set, and those were the
people they were trying to win over with the PC. I'm not sure the PC
world would have been interested in a micro-360. Micros were used for
one person at a time, not as an alternative to batch-processing
mainframes. Applications written to be run as batch processes don't
make good interactive applications. People who bought PCs wanted to
run spreadsheets and do word processing, not run payroll twice a
month. For one thing, no one's micros were reliable enough yet to
handle the payroll or the accounts receivable.
A significant part of the IBM PC's success was its open design.
Anyone could make add-ons or software for it. If it was closed, it
might not have been a success -- much like DEC's PC offerings.
Also, the IBM PC was cheap to design and produce, using off-the-shelf
made-in-Asia parts. If they'd designed all the parts themselves, it
would have been much more expensive. Again, like DEC's micros. The
IBM PC was already on the expensive side for a micro.
Yes, we see in retrospect that letting another company have the rights
to the OS was a huge mistake, especially since the hardware was open.
-- Patrick
Quadibloc
wrote:
> You're right it is not really insensitive. The lower case appears before the upper case of a given character. I.e. "apple" is before "Apple". My bad terminology. I guess the order is aAbBcCdD and so on.
The STRETCH did that, and it didn't work.
What you have to do is this:
apple -> APPLExxxxx
Apple -> APPLEXxxxx
to get dictionary order. So you basically want the case distinction to
be in a "resource fork" of the string.
John Savard
Patrick Scheible
> On Dec 31 2009, 2:28=A0pm, John.McK...@HEALTHMARKETS.COM (McKown, John)
> wrote:
>
> > You're right it is not really insensitive. The lower case appears before =
> the upper case of a given character. I.e. "apple" is before "Apple". My bad=
> terminology. I guess the order is aAbBcCdD and so on.
>
> The STRETCH did that, and it didn't work.
>
> What you have to do is this:
>
> apple -> APPLExxxxx
>
> Apple -> APPLEXxxxx
>
> to get dictionary order. So you basically want the case distinction to
> be in a "resource fork" of the string.
Every printed dictionary I've ever seen ignores case. If they end up
with two words that are spelled the same way, which files first is
decided by other characteristics, such as part of speech, date at
which the word originated, or how frequently the word is used.
-- Patrick
jmfbahciv
backup and BACKUP.
/BAH
Jean-Marc Bourguet
(bit.listserv.ibm-main trimmed as it is unknown of my usenet provider)
Patrick Scheible <k...@zipcon.net> writes:
> Every printed dictionary I've ever seen ignores case. If they end up
> with two words that are spelled the same way, which files first is
> decided by other characteristics, such as part of speech, date at which
> the word originated, or how frequently the word is used.
As far as I know, these rules
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_ordering_rules are based on what
dictionnaries were doing for a long time -- probably not always
consistently between dictionnaries makers when you consider the relative
order of diacritics and of the other signs. I've been exposed to them in
the early nineties and since then I've never remarked exceptions.
I've just checked the three printed english dictionnaries I've here for
polish and Polish and they are putting the capitalized word after the non
capitalized one (they all were printed in the eighties or in the nineties).
Something which is not clear in that page is that there may be things which
depend on the language. In french for example, we consider the diacritic
starting from the end, while my understanding is that in english you
consider them starting from the beginning.
Yours,
--
Jean-Marc
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> (bit.listserv.ibm-main trimmed as it is unknown of my usenet provider)
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009s.html#63 CAPS Fantasia
thread originated on ibm-main (mainframe) mailing list, i added
a.f.c. x-post when I replied about some of ascii stuff.
ibm-main originated on bitnet in the 80s ... using listserv mailing list
processing. some number of the bitnet mailing list are gateway to usenet
in the "bit.listserv" hierarchy. listserv was something of subset of
function of TOOLSRUN running on the internal network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
misc. past posts mentioning bitnet (&/or EARN)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet
listserv historical reference (paris, 1985):
http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv-history.asp
the bitnet extension in europe was EARN. old email from somebody taking
assignment to setup EARN
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#email840320
in this post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#65 UUCP email
Charlie Gibbs
writes:
> Patrick Scheible wrote:
>
>> Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
>>
>>> On Dec 31 2009, 2:28=A0pm, John.McK...@HEALTHMARKETS.COM
>>> (McKown, John) wrote:
>>>
>>>> You're right it is not really insensitive. The lower case appears
>>>> before the upper case of a given character. I.e. "apple" is before
>>>> "Apple". My bad terminology. I guess the order is aAbBcCdD and so
>>>> on.
>>>
>>> The STRETCH did that, and it didn't work.
>>>
>>> What you have to do is this:
>>>
>>> apple -> APPLExxxxx
>>>
>>> Apple -> APPLEXxxxx
>>>
>>> to get dictionary order. So you basically want the case distinction
>>> to be in a "resource fork" of the string.
Resource fork? Way too much complexity. Just use a case-insensitive
string comparison routine, which will work on any data without requiring
an attribute bureaucracy.
>> Every printed dictionary I've ever seen ignores case. If they end up
>> with two words that are spelled the same way, which files first is
>> decided by other characteristics, such as part of speech, date at
>> which the word originated, or how frequently the word is used.
>
> But what about indexing? There is a huge difference between
> backup and BACKUP.
Do a case-insensitive sort that uses case as a tie-breaker.
--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
Patrick Scheible
> (bit.listserv.ibm-main trimmed as it is unknown of my usenet provider)
>
> Patrick Scheible <k...@zipcon.net> writes:
>
> > Every printed dictionary I've ever seen ignores case. If they end up
> > with two words that are spelled the same way, which files first is
> > decided by other characteristics, such as part of speech, date at which
> > the word originated, or how frequently the word is used.
>
> As far as I know, these rules
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_ordering_rules are based on what
> dictionnaries were doing for a long time -- probably not always
> consistently between dictionnaries makers when you consider the relative
> order of diacritics and of the other signs. I've been exposed to them in
> the early nineties and since then I've never remarked exceptions.
Those rules look needlessly complex. Library filing in the
English-speaking world ignores diacritical marks and case -- both
filing cards in card catalogs in the olden days and sorting online
catalog browse lists in the newer days.
> I've just checked the three printed english dictionnaries I've here for
> polish and Polish and they are putting the capitalized word after the non
> capitalized one (they all were printed in the eighties or in the nineties).
It just looks that way. Actually they are ignoring case and putting
the proper nouns after the common nouns.
> Something which is not clear in that page is that there may be things which
> depend on the language. In french for example, we consider the diacritic
> starting from the end, while my understanding is that in english you
> consider them starting from the beginning.
I'm not sure what you mean by starting from the end or the beginning.
-- Patrick
Ahem A Rivet's Shot
Jean-Marc Bourguet <j...@bourguet.org> wrote:
> Something which is not clear in that page is that there may be things
> which depend on the language. In french for example, we consider the
> diacritic starting from the end, while my understanding is that in
> english you consider them starting from the beginning.
The rules for collation in a great many languages have been
captured in the ICU library from the Unicode Collation Algorithm, for the
gory details see:
http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/
--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/