You are right. I worked for the first company that created an off-the-shelf translator (Telink, Inc). The owners were some of the founding members of the X12 committee. And Dale Sortland was very very highbrow. He'd come in, holes in the elbows of his sweater. You'd ask him a question and he's stand in the doorway, leaning, stroking his beard, totally lost in thought. If you tried, after a few minutes, to interrupt his train of thought, or step away, he'd just raise a finger.
He was a helluva guy, and brilliant. If you think it through, the actual structure of standard has changed very very very little over the years. The ISA has never changed. Nor has the IEA, GE, ST, or SE (not that there is a lot there to change). Heck, the only change to the GS was to increase the date. They planned for the concept of sub-element separators, even though they were not implemented for many versions. All of this in a world of 1200 baud async modems with zero error correction. All of the focus was on using no bandwidth, and no disk space. Back then, a 10 meg drive ran nearly a grand. Small, flexible, capable. Pretty amazing really that it got us this far. Frankly, the * was used because in that day and age, many systems were not able to readily read or write non-standard characters. The * was one that had very little place in a world where every character counted. Does anyone remember Packed data? Now *that* was overkill. Pete On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 12:10 PM, Michael Mattias/LS < [email protected]> wrote: > > That's what you get when high-brow, "ivy tower" types put something in > writing and leave it to the minions to deal with! :) > > Surely you are not suggesting people with exactly zero Real World > experience are allowed to issue specifications - without adult > supervision - are you? > > I'm shocked, shocked! > > > MCM > > > > ------------------------------------ > > ... > Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: > <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> > > Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: > <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix.Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix.Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
