On Wednesday 25 May 2016 19:10, Christopher Reimer wrote: > Back in the early 1980's, I grew up on 8-bit processors and latin-1 was all > we had for ASCII.
It really, truly wasn't. But you can be forgiven for not knowing that, since until the rise of the public Internet most people weren't exposed to more than one code page or encoding, and it was incredibly common for people to call *any* encoding "ASCII". (That's like calling any computer "an IBM", or any soft-drink "Coke".) But being an old Mac user from the 1980s, I'm very aware that DOS and Mac used different character sets, although even I wasn't aware at the time that the DOS character sets were internationalised with different versions of "extended ASCII". (That's how Anglo-centric I was in the 1980s: I honestly never gave a moment's thought to the fact that, say, Greek computer users would like to be able to type in Greek. I thought that while DOS users and Mac users had different character sets, all DOS users had the same character set, and likewise for Mac users.) The first code pages were from IBM in the 1970s. Different countries had their own national standards for "extended ASCII", as did different computer manufacturers. Apple, Apricot, Atari, Commodore and other hardware manufacturers used their own proprietary extensions. Due to the close partnership between IBM and Microsoft, they kept their register of code pages in sync until they fell out over OS/2 and NT. Since the 1990s, not so much. The Wikipedia articles on "Code page", "Extended ASCII" etc are good for giving a broad overview, but they lack a lot of the finer detail such as the years the different standards were formally created and when they were first made available as code pages on PCs. If you care about that sort of minutia, you will have to go digging. But very broadly speaking, even in the 1980s there was no shortage of extensions to ASCII. While the code page system was necessary at the time, the legacy of them today continues to plague computer users, causing moji-bake, errors on file systems[1], and holding back the adoption of Unicode. [1] I'm speaking from experience there. Take files created on a Windows machine using some legacy code page, and try to copy them to another server using Unicode, and depending on the intelligence of the server, you may not be able to copy them. On the flip side, there are many file names I can easily create on Linux but cannot copy to a FAT file system. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list