X-Nico

unusual facts about ASCII



.abc

ABC notation, a language for notating music using the ASCII character set

Apple II

The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20h to 5Fh) text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator.

Applications-By-Forms

It provides an ASCII form painter, which automatically binds form fields to a database using ABF, a programming language, with embedded SQL, simplifying the task of making a "CRUD" application for textual data.

ASCII Corporation

On November 26, 2001 CSK Corporation and Unison Capital Partners L.P. announced the approval of transferring the control of its subsidiary ASCII to Unison Capital Partners L.P., effective on 2002-03-30, as part of the strategy to focus the CSK's group operations on B2B businesses.

ATOK

It is occasionally taken to stand for Awa-TOKushima, site of the headquarters of JustSystems, or ASCII TO Kanji.

Backslash

In the Japanese encodings ISO 646 (a 7-bit code based on ASCII), JIS X 0201 (an 8-bit code), and Shift JIS (a multi-byte encoding which is 8-bit for ASCII), the code point 0x5C that would be used for backslash in ASCII is instead rendered as a yen mark (¥), while in Korean encoding, it is drawn as a won currency symbol (₩).

Batch file

The non-ASCII parts of these are incompatible with the Unicode or Windows character sets otherwise used in Windows so care needs to be taken.

Bell 103 modem

The American synth-pop band Information Society featured a track entitled "300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or Ascii Download)" on their album Peace and Love, Inc. that could be decoded to a text message by holding a phone handset connected to a Bell 103 modem up to the speaker playing the track.

Bob Bemer

He also served, with Hugh McGregor Ross and others, on the separate committee which defined the ASCII character codeset in 1960, contributing several characters which had not previously been used by computers including the ESCape character, the backslash character, and the curly bracket characters.

CDC display code

The NOS 6/12 display code is one of the character sets used on CDC Cyber NOS computers to represent all ASCII characters.

CICS

In 1980, IBM executives failed to heed Ben Riggins' strong suggestions that IBM should provide their own EBCDIC-based operating system and integrated-circuit microprocessor chip for use in the IBM Personal Computer as a CICS intelligent terminal (instead of the incompatible Intel chip, and immature ASCII-based Microsoft 1980 DOS).

DoomRL

As of 0.9.9.6, Derek Yu's graphical tileset is now the game's default, offering an alternative to the more traditional ASCII rendering.

EBCDIC

Open-source-software advocate and hacker Eric S. Raymond writes in his Jargon File that EBCDIC was almost universally loathed by early hackers and programmers because of its multitude of different versions, none of which resembled the other versions, and that IBM produced it in direct competition with the already-established ASCII.

Email attachment

With MIME, a message and all its attachments are encapsulated in a single multipart message, with base64 encoding to convert binary into 7-bit ASCII - or on modern mail servers running Extended SMTP, optionally full 8-bit support via the 8BITMIME extension.

ESpeak

eSpeak uses an ASCII representation of phoneme names which is loosely based on the Kirshenbaum system.

FASTQ format

Starting with Illumina 1.3 and before Illumina 1.8, the format encoded a Phred quality score from 0 to 62 using ASCII 64 to 126 (although in raw read data Phred scores from 0 to 40 only are expected).

Sanger format can encode a Phred quality score from 0 to 93 using ASCII 33 to 126 (although in raw read data the Phred quality score rarely exceeds 60, higher scores are possible in assemblies or read maps).

Fieldata

The direct successor to the UNIVAC 1100 is the Unisys 2200 series computers, which use Fieldata to this day (although ASCII is now also common with each character encoded in 1/4 of a word, or 9 bits).

Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format

The string name of this particular character is "U+0041", expressing in the Unicode convention the code point hexadecimal 41 (decimal 65, the ASCII character "A").

GOST

GOST 10859: A 1964 character set for computers, includes non-ASCII/non-Unicode characters required when programming in the ALGOL programming language.

GSM 03.40

Some ASCII characters and the Euro sign did not fit into the GSM 7 bit default alphabet and must be encoded using two septets.

Heap spraying

Depending on how the browser implements strings, either ASCII or Unicode characters can be used in the string.

Help authoring tool

File formats that can be imported vary from HAT to HAT, though they can include such formats as ASCII, HTML, OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word, and compiled Help formats such as Microsoft WinHelp and Microsoft Compressed HTML Help.

International email

International email (IDN email or Intl email) is email that contains international, UTF-8 encoded, characters (characters which do not exist in the ASCII character set) in the email header.

Island of Kesmai

In the summer of 1980 University of Virginia classmates John Taylor and Kelton Flinn wrote Dungeons of Kesmai, a six player game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons which used Roguelike ASCII graphics.

Media Works Bunko

Winners of the Media Works Bunko Prize in ASCII Media Works' Dengeki Novel Prize annual contest are published on this imprint, along with winning 500,000 yen.

Netpbm format

The PBM format was invented by Jef Poskanzer in the 1980s as a format that allowed monochrome bitmaps to be transmitted within an email message as plain ASCII text, allowing it to survive any changes in text formatting.

Pileup format

If present, the ASCII value of the character minus 33 gives the mapping Phred quality of each of the bases in the previous column 5.

Punycode

Punycode is intended for the encoding of labels in the Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) framework, such that these domain names may be represented in the ASCII character set allowed in the Domain Name System of the Internet.

Shift JIS art

Unlike Western ASCII art, which is generally designed to be viewed with a monospaced font, Shift JIS art is designed around the proportional-width MS PGothic font supplied with Microsoft Windows, which is the default font for web sites in Japanese versions of Windows.

Sim RPG Maker

The first was a console version released on September 17, 1998, for the Sega Saturn, the second for the Sony PlayStation in Japan only by ASCII.

Symbols for zero

An alternative, the slashed zero (looking similar to the letter O except for the slash), was primarily used in hand-written coding sheets before transcription to punched cards or tape, and is also used in old-style ASCII graphic sets descended from the default typewheel on the Teletype Model 33 ASR.

Telecommunications device for the deaf

In order to be compatible with the existing TTY network, the MCM was designed around the five-bit Baudot code established by the older TTY machines instead of the ASCII code used by computers.

The Blind Messenger

Carl Weingarten – Dobro and EBow on "Message to the Blind Watchmaker (Ascii Mayhem)"

Tokunaga Muneo

He is an authority on Indian epics, and in 1994 provided the world with the first digital, searchable text, in ASCII format, of the Mahabharata, based on the Poona Critical Edition.

UTF-8

Dave Prosser of Unix System Laboratories submitted a proposal for one that had faster implementation characteristics and introduced the improvement that 7-bit ASCII characters would only represent themselves; all multibyte sequences would include only bytes where the high bit was set.

Wavefront .obj file

The Material Template Library format (MTL) is a standard defined by Wavefront Technologies for ASCII files that define the light reflecting properties of a surface for the purposes of computer rendering, and according to the Phong reflection model.

World's Smallest Political Quiz

Toby Nixon created an ASCII text copy of the Quiz in the era prior to the World Wide Web, and this version was circulated in newsgroups, computer networks, bulletin boards, and on software.

XPM

X PixMap, an ASCII text image format used by the X Window System (uses the extension .xpm)


see also