From the ASCII perspective (yes) or from the general concept of the opening single quotation mark (no)?
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The basic story is that CCITT rightly decided (Oct 29-31, 1963) that the grave accent was necessary. July 1964 ISO draft is emphatic that it is only an accent mark, not defined if used in isolation https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii-1964/page/n34 …pic.twitter.com/nzT61M0UTa
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Which must have been in reaction to a US attempt to define it as an opening quotation mark, but as far as I can tell that wordsmithing does not actually appear in the US draft until September, 1964 https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii-1964/page/n50 …pic.twitter.com/7VZurUbWeW
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Replying to @enf
So it’s sort of like underscore? Starting as a dead/additive key (physically or conceptually) and then becoming its own independent thing?
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It seems like some decisions made more sense when computers came with printers, not displays? But we inherited them.
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Replying to @mwichary
Yes the entire model of using backspace for composition was tied to printing terminals, but some parts of it lived on longer because programs like less(1) go out of their way to transform backspaced underlining and bold into escape sequences
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Replying to @mwichary
Eric Fischer Retweeted Eric Fischer
Did you see this thread by the way? https://twitter.com/enf/status/1037138699106959360 … C's predecessor B allowed backspace in identifiers
Eric Fischer added,
Eric Fischer @enfAnother underexamined aspect of programming language history: When did the underscore become a "letter" that could be used in identifiers? C's predecessor B allowed both underscore and backspace(!) so it was probably originally there for actual underlining https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.pdf … pic.twitter.com/qP2xPva42kShow this thread1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
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Replying to @mwichary
Oh good! And Multics really embraced overstriking, with a whole input canonicalization layer to make sure programs saw the same bytes no matter what order you composed the characters in, and whether you did it with BS or CR
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Did you hear about the IBM 1620jr project at the CHM?
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Replying to @enf
Yeah, but they’re using the Wheelwriter as I/O and they’re heavily using overprinting to create the facsimiles of 1620-specific glyphs not present on Wheelwriter’s wheels.
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