[Info-vax] C limitations, was: Re: VMS process communication

[Dennis Boone]

 > But that is only during communications.  I am not aware of any program
 > that computed the value of a character in transit and cared what that
 > value was.  Pr1me set the values in their firmware forcing all programs
 > in any language to deal with an ASCII set that had values from 128 to
 > 255.  If they  had survived , I wonder what they would have done when
 > 8bit ASCII came about?

Why, used the 'space parity' moby, of course.

https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_drb_ecs.html

It's ISO-8859-1 turned upside down.

 > And the truly sad part is probably that there really was no reason for
 > it.  When Bill Lenhart was working on native mode Unix for the Pr1me
 > 50-series he "fixed" it in the microcode.  Sadly, Pr1me pulled the plug
 > on his work just before he was going to release it.

The reason is alternately given as "compatibility with the CCC/Honeywell
family", "because the teletypes typically ran that way", etc.  But the
reason it never got changed has to be because the second motto of Prime:
"And COMPATIBILITY shall Rule Forever".  (With apologies to Mosley
Meer.)

De