[SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode?

Thu Aug 20 17:29:45 PDT 2015

If you want to understand standards you to look at how the committees
established in many different ways were formed to try and get companies
needing a common standard to agree on what a new standard should be for
things like codes, pins on plugs, etc
every member of the committee is trying to get a standard that is useful
for what they want for the company without letting the other members know
what new development they were going release that needed the standard.
there was also a lot of conflicts and downright angers in the process.
For example Herb Grosch) who was with the national bureau of standards
turned down IBM's proposal for a new punch card standard and even three
years later when i joined Herb and some others for dinner at a restaurant
during and ACM yearly meeting, when we walked into the restaurant a table
of IBM professionals let out a loud BOO.    Herb actually worked for a time
at IBM in his early professional days in the US and was allowed to wear a
beard because they wanted him to stay.  Herb later on was also a president
of ACM.
One of the experimental groups we had on the NSF sponsored EIES system was
a standards group that wanted to try to arrive at standards where
everything in the discussion was anonymous so you could not identify the
participants company.  If you don't know eies you should look at the book
"the network nation: human communication via computer" hiltz and turoff,
1978 and reprinted by mit press in 1993 and still available.
The great thing about eies (Electronic Information Exchange System) is we
designed so we could give any user group a tailored communication structure
to meet their need.   all inside a system that had much more in group
communications than todays social networks.  A lot of the early research
reports of the EIES efforts are available free from the NJIT library.  The
link to this set of reports and associated user manuals even for the
earlier system EMISARI in the US government in 1971 is on there.  it had
chat among other things.
http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/index.php
we did a lot of the early experiments on online group communications which
seem to be largely forgotten today.

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Jacob Gaboury <jacob.gaboury at stonybrook.edu
> wrote:

> For those interested in the standardization of ASCII I would recommend the *Computer
> Standards Collection, 1958-1979* at the National Museum of American
> History. The collection was donated by Robert "Bob" Bemer, who is sometimes
> referred to as the father of ASCII. I looked through it a number of years
> ago, and while it wasn't relevant to my own project there was a lot there
> to work with. It deals not only with the standardization of ASCII but also
> with the work of the International Standards Organization subcommittee,
> which dealt with precisely the kinds of questions discussed here. I imagine
> Eric Hintz from the Lemelson center would be a useful resource for anyone
> who wants to follow up, and he is also member of this list <hintze at si.edu
> >.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer
>
> http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=all&source=~!siarchives&uri=full=3100001~!140356~!0#focus
>
> _Jacob
>
>
> Jacob Gaboury
> --
> Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture
> Dept. of Cultural Analysis and Theory, Stony Brook University
> --
> Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Dept II)
> Berlin, Germany 2015 - 2016
> --
> Staff Writer, Rhizome.org
> New Museum for Contemporary Art
> --
> http://www.jacobgaboury.com/
>
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 2:02 PM, James Sumner <
> james.sumner at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Hi Paul and everyone
>>
>> More a survey of concerns than a historical study, but:
>>
>> Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme, "ASCII imperialism". In Martha Lampland
>> and Susan Leigh Star (eds.), *Standards and their stories: How
>> quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life*,
>> pp.177-199. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. PDF copy at
>> <http://danielpargman.blogspot.co.uk/p/texts.html>
>> <http://danielpargman.blogspot.co.uk/p/texts.html>
>>
>> (Searching on the term "ASCII imperialism", incidentally, turns up a 1999
>> text suggesting it was first coined by the Finnish library/information
>> activist Mikael Böök -- who is himself uncommonly difficult to search on
>> precisely because of the ASCII problem...)
>>
>> Best
>> James
>>
>>
>> On 20/08/2015 16:00, Paul N.Edwards wrote:
>>
>> All, vaguely related to the interesting discussion of race - on which I
>> tend to agree with Tom H - here’s something that’s been niggling away at my
>> historical consciousness.
>>
>> In 1993 Jeffrey Shapard published an intriguing article about the
>> problems created by early standardization on ASCII 7- and 8-bit character
>> codes for Asian and other non-alphabetic languages, which can have many
>> thousands of characters (vs. the 256 representable in 8-bit ASCII).
>> Shapard, “Islands in the (Data) Stream: Language, Character Codes, and
>> Electronic Isolation in Japan,” in Linda Harasim, ed., *Global
>> networks: Computers and international communication* (MIT Press
>> Cambridge, MA., 1993).
>>
>> This problem carried over into the Web era. It was technically resolved
>> by Unicode, but that standard has still not been universally adopted.
>>
>> I’m wondering whether any historians have written about the history of
>> character encoding, especially Unicode. What I’m curious about is not the
>> technical history itself, but how the character-code problem affected/was
>> affected by culture (“electronic isolation," as per Shapard? indigenous
>> efforts, vs. IBM’s world-market goals? alternative pathways?). Do any of
>> you know archive- or interview-based accounts that go into some of the
>> cultural and social background and implications?
>>
>> NB, there was a 3-part history of IBM's efforts in Asia, especially kanji
>> representations, in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Jan.-March
>> 2005, by: Hensch, K.; Iqi, T.; Iwao, M.; Oda, A.; Takeshita.
>>
>> There are also number of rather thorough and interesting histories by
>> developer-protagonists and users, such as these:
>>
>> S. Searle, A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe,
>> and Asia <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html>
>>
>> S. Searle, Unicode Revisited
>> <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html>
>>
>> J. Becker, Unicode 88 <http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf> (1988
>> proposal from Xerox PARC)
>>
>> Curious for any thoughts or references.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>> —————————————————
>> Paul N. Edwards, Professor of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu> and
>> History <http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>
>> On sabbatical July-December 2015 — replies will be slow or nonexistent
>>
>> Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/>. Here's why!
>> <http://emailcharter.org>
>>
>> University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/>
>> 4437 North Quad
>> 105 S. State Street
>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
>> Twitter: @AVastMachine <https://twitter.com/avastmachine>
>> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
>>
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