From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Jan 08 2004 - 01:07:04 EST
Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <antonio at tuvalkin dot web dot pt> wrote:
> Anyway -- it was space for three wholes, the small whole for the
> tractor wheel, and space for four more, IIRC.
>
> |O OoOO |
> ...
>
> Any bells ringing? Wouldn't this be a nice "complete" set of chars to
> be encoded, a la Braille patterns?...
This is not so much a script as a UTF. (In fact, Ken Whistler has
already done something similar as a joke; search the Unicode mailing
list archives for "BTF".)
The analogy with Braille is tempting, but Braille has mappings to many
other alphabets besides the commonly seen English/Latin mapping. There
is Cyrillic Braille, Hebrew Braille, kana Braille, etc. More
importantly, there is the concept of "Level 2 Braille" in which a single
dot pattern or a combination of two or three is assigned a meaning that
varies depending on context, and is not always mnemonically derived from
the individual letters. Punched-tape codes and card codes don't have
these characteristics.
You can find more codes for punched cards and tape, as well as internal
codes for early computers, at Dik Winter's site:
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/
or at Roman Czyborra's site, rumored to be at http://czyborra.com but
usually not available.
BTW, speaking of Roman, thanks to everyone who responded to my inquiries
about his whereabouts. Actually, I admit I was primarily interested in
what had happened to his *site*, since it was (and still is) usually
unavailable.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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