19 Sep
2023
19 Sep
'23
2:02 a.m.
Joe Ossanna worked diligently to see that WECo's ASCII teletype really
would come to market and would meet the needs of Unix. He famously
estimated that Bell Labs alone was a sizable market: 777 machines. He
also leaned on WECo to make the return key issue a single newline. And
he specified what non-ascii characters would fill out the 128
positions on the Bell Labs type boxes. This requires encoding 7-bit
ASCII in 8 bits. I don't know whether WECo had been planning to do so
anyway.
Doug