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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

ASCII was very carefully designed.

One feature I like is that you can neatly cut out a 64-character 6-bit all-uppercase encoding (like DEC's) if you don't need lowercase.

Wikipedia covers some of the design choices here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Internal_organization

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The 1963 ASCII standard also lists many of the design considerations.

http://worldpowersystems.com/archives/codes/X3.4-1963/index....

  > One feature I like is that you can neatly cut out a 64-character 6-bit all-uppercase encoding (like DEC's) if you don't need lowercase.

And if you take the digits from the 0x3X column and the non-digits from the 0x2X column (flipping one bit), you get 0123456789*+,-./ which is enough to write numbers and the basic arithmetic operators. This too was deliberate.

Yes and on keybord shift+1 becomes

The TRS-80s had the lovely feature that all of the punctuation above the digits were consistent with ASCII layout. shift-1 was !, as per usual, but also shift-2 was ", and ' was shift-7. On the Model I they even went so far as to make shift-0 produce a space! (On the Model III however, they reused shift-0 to toggle between uppercase and lowercase mode -- sort of a reverse caps-lock key.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard

In about 1978 I designed my own keyboard. The unique feature it had was that the key positions were used as address lines into a ROM, and I was free to assign any character to any key I wanted. Shift/Ctrl weren't required to be at all related to the base character. Today we take it for granted, but back then it was radical.

How many keys were there? I suppose there must have been a lot more keys than your ROM had address lines.

My Japanese keyboard still has that punctuation ordering.

I thought the pattern was from 01000 to 11111 gives you ()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>? but I can see what you are talking about.

Here is a nice history of ASCII: https://github.com/ericfischer/ascii

Thank you!

For a more detailed look at the design decisions in ASCII and its predecessors, check out Character Coding Sets: History and Development by Charles Mackenzie, one of the best technical books I've ever read.

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