From: Simon Butcher (pickle@alien.net.au)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 04:19:40 EST
Hi Philippe!
> > When dealing with protocol specifications, there's often a need for
> characters like these, too, since hex byte pictures are
> unambiguous. I have
> a DEC dumb terminal around here somewhere which also uses them when
> debugging control characters.
> >
> > I suppose you could argue it's purely a formatting issue, though.
>
> If you've got some technical documentation reference of this
> terminal, it
> would be worth to give it as it will be used in technical
> documentations.
It's a DEC VT320, and it's second hand like all of my dumb terminals, so I've never actually had the original manual. Upon closer inspection, it only appears to do hex-byte pictures for some C1 control pictures -- see <http://vt100.net/built-in_glyphs.html>.
The VT220 did a similar thing, but more of it - no cuddly names for NEL and so on, plus some other chars have hex-byte pictures (probably as they were unassigned, but I am unsure) -- see <http://vt100.net/docs/vt220-rm/table2-16b.html>.
I'm pretty sure my Wyse WY60's (and probably my WY85's too) do the same thing, but they're so buried under junk it's probably not worth pulling them out to check.
> What you suggest is something else: it's a proposal to encode
> technical
> characters similar to control images, or to glyphs of keys on
> a keyboard. It
> is not a script, but a handy collection of unique glyphs.
I feel we're on the same wavelength now! :) Indeed, not a numeric system but technical symbols.
> In a similar technical domain, I don't know if the technical
> glyphs that are
> (were?) used on terminals for IBM MVS systems, are all
> encoded. I remember
> there was a sort of zig-zag arrow pointing to bottom left, as
> well as other
> symbols denoting the current state of the terminal, and a few
> others to
> denote editing operations in a screen mode: one had to mark a
> edited line
> with a symbol, and the terminal took care of remember where
> editing was
> allowed and performed, and once you had created a modified
> line, you pressed
> a "Send" key to get the screen updated with the new text after editing
> operations.
Sounds very familiar :) Stuff like the stick figure (which on some terminals looked more like a cowboy), don't appear to be in unicode, but then again, were those characters ever actually a part of the IBM 3270 charsets, or were they simply internal only?
> This was more or less working in a way similar to the "vi"
> editor line-mode interface, except that it was screen-based
> rather than
> line-based.
Looking at the original proposal by Frank da Cruz again after so long (http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/hex.txt) reveals it cites many documents. Have a look at <http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/terminal-exhibits.pdf> (~2.7MiB).
BTW, Frank also had other proposals which included the IBM 3270 characters I think you were referring to (poke around the directory at <http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/ucsterminal/>)..
I like the hex byte pictures proposal, and I'm seeing more reason to like it, the more I look into it..
Cheers!
- Simon
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