On 07/09/2013 08:22 AM, Neil Cerutti wrote:
On 2013-07-08, Dave Angel <da...@davea.name> wrote:
I appreciate you've been around a long time, and worked in a
lot of languages. I've programmed professionally in at least
35 languages since 1967. But we've come a long way from the
6bit characters I used in 1968. At that time, we packed them
10 characters to each word.
One of the first Python project I undertook was a program to dump
the ZSCII strings from Infocom game files. They are mostly packed
one character per 5 bits, with escapes to (I had to recheck the
Z-machine spec) latin-1. Oh, those clever implementors: thwarting
hexdumping cheaters and cramming their games onto microcomputers
with one blow.
In 1973 I played with encoding some data that came over the public
airwaves (I never learned the specific radio technology, probably used
sidebands of FM stations). The data was encoded, with most characters
taking 5 bits, and the decoded stream was like a ticker-tape. With some
hardware and the right software, you could track Wall Street in real
time. (Or maybe it had the usual 15 minute delay).
Obviously, they didn't publish the spec any place. But some others had
the beginnings of a decoder, and I expanded on that. We never did
anything with it, it was just an interesting challenge.
--
DaveA
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