> On Feb 17, 2025, at 7:45 AM, Frank Leonhardt via cctalk
> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On 16/02/2025 21:21, David Wade via cctalk wrote:
>> On 16/02/2025 20:51, paul.kimpel--- via cctalk wrote:
>>> I don't understand -- ASCII had only two versions, 1963 and 1967, and both
>>> had square brackets. The IBM PC used ASCII, but had nothing to do with its
>>> standardization.
>> I can't find the context for this, but it was early EBCDIC devices which
>> lacked square brackets, and there was a big debate in the academic world
>> where to put them in the code page...
>>
>> https://x3270.miraheze.org/wiki/Why_are_the_square_bracket_characters_displayed_wrong%3F
>>
>>
>> ... and here is a 3270 keyboard....
>>
>> https://sharktastica.co.uk/directory?id=94OROEAU
>
> I was assuming it was a reference particular machines that had limited ASCII.
> Square brackets were missing from a lot of keyboards, but not the IBM PC,
> which turned up with "everything" and function keys too. Before then I felt I
> was lucky when I had lower case. And don't start on ASCII hard copy terminals.
I've never seen an ASCII terminal that was missing square brackets. But in
theory those codes were "national use" codes, and for non-English language use
they would be redefined as A with umlaut or stuff like that. This is why
RSTS/E at some point introduced parentheses as alternates for the square
brackets it had always used as directory name delimiters. For us in the US
that was never interesting.
The problem was fixed fairly well with the introduction of the DEC
Multinational Character Set, which later morphed into ISO Latin-1 (with the
curious omission of the oe ligature) and later the various other Latin-<n>
sets. And the problem was solved completely with Unicode.
paul
