Weird charset, TWX

From: Tex Texin (texin@bedford.progress.COM)
Date: Thu Sep 25 1997 - 12:31:58 EDT


This question came to me. The encoding is strange. I suspect that parity
bits are confusing things and perhaps this is an encoding specific to
Telex. Anyone have any ideas what this is?

Does it make more sense when viewed on paper tape? ;-)
tex

Tex
We are hoping to hook up to the state system for getting
at driver information for insurance purposes. The problem is that
according to the documentation I have, the character set is something
weird. I do not yet have permission to test to see what actually
is going to come back. Maybe it will all come in ASCII (or even
EBCDIC) and I'll be happy. But just in case, I thought I'd ask.

The system claims to operation 'under a TTY (TWX) asynchronous dial
up mode' to support 'other than IBM manufacturers display terminals'.
It is running on an IBM-3081 with a CICS-BTAM telecommunications handler.

They also claim they are using an ASCII data stream at 1200 baud,
using 202 and 103 Bell compatible modems. They also say that the
HEX representations are MARK parity.

I don't know if any of the above means anything.

Now, using their documentation, here's how the characters coming over
the line decode:

  spc 05h 5 | '1' 8Dh 141 | 'M' B2h 178
  cr B1h 177 | '2' 4Dh 77 | 'N' 72h 114
  lf 51h 81 | '5' ACh 172 | 'O' F3h 243
  del FFh 255 | 'A' 82h 130 | 'P' 0Ah 10
  xon 89h 137 | 'B' 43h 67 | 'R' 4Bh 75
  xoff C9h 201 | 'C' C3h 195 | 'S' CAh 202
  wru A1h 161 | 'D' 22h 34 | 'T' 2Bh 43
  bel E1h 225 | 'E' A3h 163 | 'U' ABh 171
  '.' 74h 116 | 'F' 63h 99 | 'V' 6Ah 106
  '/' F5h 245 | 'H' 12h 18 | 'Y' 9Ah 154
  '-' B5h 181 | 'I' 93h 147
  '0' 0Ch 12 | 'L' 33h 51

Do you have a clue as to what codepage this could be from?

Thanks for any help you can give.

-- Tony

-- 
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Tex Texin                    
Manager International Development and Product Management
                                 
Progress Software Corp.        Voice:   +1-781-280-4271
14 Oak Park                      Fax:   +1-781-280-4949
Bedford, MA 01730  USA          
http://www.progress.com      texin@bedford.progress.com
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