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

Fri Aug 21 00:34:57 PDT 2015

Dear all,

I hope this is not too off topic, but I have been meaning to ask for a
while now (after dabbling through some literature in vain) if anyone can
point me to work on the invention, development, or emergence of the concept
of the string. For an article I am developing I need to know why and how
this linear structure arose. Is this simply a result of how the Turing
machine was conceived? I bet there's more to it?

Thanks, and all the best
--Joris

On vr 21 aug. 2015 at 02:29 Murray Turoff <murray.turoff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/>
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>>> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
>>>
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>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
>
>
>
>
>
> *please send messages to murray.turoff at gmail.com
> <murray.turoff at gmail.com>  do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu>
> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage:
> http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*
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