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
