Ascii Code For Quotes

Kepler quickly designed a script, an automatically executing command sequence that converted the six-character code into an ASCII sequence.

Computers can use combinations of bits to represent anything; the number of bits depends on the number of messages that need to be distinguished. Imagine, for example, a computer that works with the letters of the alphabet. Five-bit input signals can represent thirty-two different possibilities (25 = 32). Functions within the computer that work on letters sometimes use such a code, although they more often use an encoding with seven or eight bits, to allow representation of capitals, punctuation marks, numerals, and so on. Most modern computers use the standard representation of alphabet letters called ASCII (an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange). In ASCII, the sequence 1000001 represents the capital letter A, and 1000010 represents the capital B, and so on. The convention, of course, is arbitrary.

IBM launched its Chess machine, renamed simply the Personal Computer, in August 1981, a scant four months after the Star. Judged against the technology PARC had brought forth, it was a homely and feeble creature. Rather than bitmapped graphics and variable typefaces, its screen displayed only ASCII characters, glowing a hideous monochromatic green against a black background. Instead of a mouse, the PC had four arrow keys on the keyboard that laboriously moved the cursor, character by character and line by line. No icons, no desktop metaphor, no multitasking windows, no e-mail, no Ethernet. Forswearing the Star’s intuitive point-and-click operability, IBM forced its customers to master an abstruse lexicon of typed commands and cryptic responses developed by Microsoft, its software partner. Where the Star was a masterpiece of integrated reliability, the PC had a perverse tendency to crash at random (a character flaw it bequeathed to many subsequent generations of Microsoft Windows-driven machines). But where the Star sold for $16,595-plus, the IBM PC sold for less than $5,000, all-inclusive. Where the Star’s operating system was closed, accessible for enhancement only to those to whom Xerox granted a coded key, the PC’s circuitry and microcode were wide open to anyone willing to hack a program for it—just like the Alto’s. And it sold in the millions.

ASCII text files, in other words, are telegrams, and as such they have no typographical frills. But for the same reason they are eternal, because the code never changes, and universal, because every text-editing and word-processing software ever written knows about this code.