Hi
At the time, I thought that my post yesterday concluded the thread.
However, later something occurred to me as a result of something in the
post by Sławomir Osipiuk.
The gentleman wrote as follows:
Sending multiples of the same message in different languages is really
only applicable to broadcast/multicast scenarios, where you have a
transmission going out live to multiple recipients who have different
language demands. I can't immediately think of any examples where this
is done with plain-text only, though I'd be glad to learn about them,
if they exist.
Whilst I do not know of anything of where this is presently done, I
realized that this would be a practical proposition for some of the
things in the Internet of things.
I am reminded of the teletext system (with brand names such as Ceefax
and Oracle) in the United KIngdom, which was a broadcasting technology
introduced in the 1970s and which became very much a part of British
culture during the 1980s and 1990s. A digital signal of a special
purpose 7-bit character set was broadcast in the vertical blanking
interval of a 625 line analogue television signal. Basically in some
lines normally used for the colour picture but some lines were not used
during the time allowed for the scan go back to the top of the picture
once it reached the lower edge of the picture. So this digital
information service got a free ride in the picture signal going out to
receivers all over the country. The information was organised into pages
and an end user could go to "text" and then wait for a selected page to
come round again in the continuous cyclic broadcasting of pages. Pages
could be arranged by the broadcaster so that, say, the news headlines
page came around maybe four times in each, say, 20 second cycle and some
pages only once. It was very effective as the special purpose 7-bit
character set, while being basically ASCII, had control characters that
were stateful and displayed each as a space yet some of them switched
the colour of the following text until a new control character for a
colour were received, if it indeed one were received; or until the end
of the 40 character line of the display. Each line started with white
text, though if the first character of the line switched to a colour,
the end user would not see any white text. The control codes set also
included switching to chunky graphics mode. There was also a facility to
use the system for subtitles to the television programme, optional
subtitles so that end users could have them on if desired yet other
users were not thereby forced to have subtitles. It was good, as various
participants in a discussion - whether news or drama - could each have a
colour for their speaking, such as green, yellow, cyan, white. No return
link was needed to send information from the end user to the central
broadcasting computer.
A system with the same format of display was a viewdata system (brand
name Prestel) but that was very different from teletext and used a
two-way telephone line connection. In a viewdata system, the end user
selected a page from a menu then a message requesting that page was sent
to the central computer and just that page was sent to the end user. A
fee for a page was often charged and the system never really took off.
Teletext thrived because economy of scale brought the cost of
teletext-capable electronics down and it was installed using a set of
for-the-purpose integrated circuits during manufacture of most colour
television sets in that era, and once installed then it was a free
add-on with no ongoing cost apart from the ordinary television licence.
It seems to me that there could be, in the future, a type of thing that
sends out a continuous signal over a wire of, say, a temperature reading
at its location, all formatted in several languages. So, no passwords,
no input from an end user, just a continuous feeding into The Internet
of Things its output, with the numerical value in the messages changed
as the temperature changes. This would allow the digits to be expressed
in the digits used in the particular script of the particular language
used in an individual message.
William Overington
Wednesday 12 February 2020
