How about "escessively humble"?

Post #198,614 by drewk 3/14/05 5:35:25 PM Reply	How about "escessively humble"? They used two digits for the year because they didn't think their code would still be in use that far in the future. They assumed that when someone 40 years in the future wanted to program a computer they'd write something for it. They probably thought the same thing about language. At the time, they were writing for their specific piece of hardware. They assumed that when someone wanted to run their own new computer they'd write their own language and operating system to do it, just like everyone else always had. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #198,621 by jake123 3/14/05 6:09:09 PM Reply	Look, the point about the two digits for a year is well taken, but the point about ascii is not. It was supposed to be a standard that could be used by anybody, but ended up only being really usable by people who speak and use only English. The idea that they only expected americans to use it is easily debunked by reading any of the literature extant at the time... what they did expect is that only americans would program it. --\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca \n [link\|http://consultron.ca\|http://consultron.ca] [link\|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca\|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] \n Kingston Ontario Canada [link\|news://news.consultron.ca\|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
Post #200,492 by jb4 3/25/05 2:15:41 PM Reply	Disagree ASCII was supposed to be a standard for American Information Interchange (as pointed out above), hence the name. And being first it followed the now-increasingly-popular YAGNI rule. Hey, I didn't notice that IBM (International Business Machines) fixed the problem with its highly vaunted and hopelessly idiotic EBCDIC, either. When ASCII became problematic due to its limitations, it was extended (in the best style of Micros~1); now we have UNICODE, and a whole raft of ISO 8859's. And then there are the Asians: JIS, Shift-JIS, GB2232, GB18030, Big 5 et al. So now you can have your \ufffd in any one of several dozen encoding schemes. Ain't choice grand? jb4 shrub\ufffdbish (Am., from shrub* + rubbish, after the derisive name for America's 43 president; 2003) n. 1. a form of nonsensical political doubletalk wherein the speaker attempts to defend the indefensible by lying, obfuscation, or otherwise misstating the facts; GIBBERISH. 2. any of a collection of utterances from America's putative 43rd president. cf.* BULLSHIT
Post #198,640 by tuberculosis 3/14/05 7:27:23 PM 8/21/07 6:31:43 AM Reply	Maybe... shortsighted [link\|http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ethnocentric\|ethnocentrists]. After all Information Interchange implies you might want to exchange it with someone. Not those nobodies - only our kind of someones. Whatever. Anyhow that collection of cheap hacks is way broken. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:31:43 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #198,652 by a6l6e6x 3/14/05 8:02:42 PM Reply	How about simply "provincial". Solving their own problems and not the worlds. Do you forget that 6 computers were going to satisfy all the computational needs of the world? And no one has yet mentioned IBM's EBCDIC - Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code which came out in 1964 or so. These came in "national" flavors. Hey, 2nd generation computers used 6-bit codes for characters (related to punch card codes) - uppercase letters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks. [link\|http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/codes.html\|Link]. It's evolution, guys! Alex The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell

Welcome to IWETHEY!