5 Sep
2017
5 Sep
'17
6:07 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 5, 2017, at 11:05, John Labovitz wrote:
I have a book here called _Coded Character Sets,
History and Development_
(C.E. Mackenzie, 1980, Addison-Wesley) that is a wealth of info.
According to that book, the early 60s military codes were 7-bit, not
8-bit. Maybe Jennings is referring to a later standard?
Or maybe it was a 7-bit code with a parity bit and they're counting it
as 8-bit.
The only reference I can find to a ‘DoD standard’ is
this:
> During the early 1960s, a different kind of solution was tried in the Department of
Defense. Recognizing that 42 graphics — 26 alphabetics, 10 numerics, and 6 specials
(period, comma, slash, asterisk, minus sign, and dollar sign) — were common to all
trains/chains, an edict was issued that only these 42 graphics could be used on reports.
[…] (p. 420)
I found a pre-ASCII standard proposal at
https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii-1961-09 that refers to
"MIL-STD-188A". Googling *that* finds stuff referring to Fieldata, so
that's probably what it's referring to. Fieldata does have a
"Special"
control character immediately before DEL. And now that I check again,
the WPS page does say "For all intents and purposes "FIELDATA" today
refers to the character code. It, or a minor variant, is sometimes
called the "DoD standard 8-bit code".