Four Column ASCII

One bit of trivia I really love is why "DEL" is at 127 -- weirdly way away from all the control codes. It's because 0x7F is all ASCII bits set to "1". Back in the early punch card (and telegraph?) days, if there was a typo, you couldn't "unpunch" a hole to make it a 0 again, but you could punch out all the rest of them, indicating "ignore this char, I've deleted it" -- 0b1111111. source: http://www.trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf which is…

I have lived my whole professional life with this being 'beyond obvious'... It's hard to imagine a generation where it's not. But then again, I did work with EBCDIC for awhile and we were reading and translating ASCII log tapes (ITT/Alcatel 1210 switch, phone calls, memory dumps). I once got drunk with my elderly unix supernerd friend and he was talking about TTYs and how his passwords contained embedded ^S and ^Q characters and he traced the login process to…

Fun fact: the delete character was designed to be all 1s in order to allow for human errors: "If a character was punched erroneously, punching out all seven bits caused this position to be ignored or deleted" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delete_character