Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

A pal who lives a few blocks away was encountering strange characters quite frequently, and this made him wonder, he told me.

This pal is someone I see online and in some Facebook groups more than face to face, and where he was encountering the strange characters was in emails he received.

I gave him an off-the-top-of-my-head explanation of why he was seeing A, wearing a beret or a paper hat, at the beginnings of sentences.

Haven’t we all seen examples of these odd characters popping up in newspaper columns? Often ampersands are involved. You know, the symbol that looks like a cat sitting up with its tail wrapped around its feet? The “and” sign? (Did you notice the curly quotes around “and,”  not straight ones we use to indicate inches? A nicety of typography.)

The top-of-head explanation I provided for my pal mentioned encoding, which sounds like a branch of spycraft. Character encoding is arcane indeed. Let’s just say, things were more laborious but simpler when Chuck Boller used to fit lead type into boxes, backwards (not the whole story, but maybe the headline, and often for ads). Or when someone viewed copy suspended nearby and prepared it for the presses on a Linotype, throwing hot lead at incredible speed.

Having learned to type on a Simplex 2B teleprinter in a Western Union tieline agency in my music store, I was confined to three rows of block capitals, and numbers and limited punctuation accessed by a shift key. There was even one that rang a bell at the other end of the transmission, after the teleprinter had encoded my keyboarding into something like Morse that could be transmitted by phone lines, and sent it forth .

I’d have learned in high school if Academic Program students had been offered typing. We weren’t, then; typing was reserved for Commercial Program students. I am thinking that is why Chuck Boller did not learn touch typing, but had to develop his own system, which seemed to work quite well for him.

Switching to a real typewriter was a treat. All those extra keys! Upper case and lower! Actual punctuation! But there were only vertical glyphs, either singles or doubles, for apostrophes, quote marks, inches and feet. Some typewriters had keys and typebars for ½; some didn’t. But they didn’t provide nearly the number of keys we are accustomed to now, with our keyboards with separate keypads and our Function keys, our Ctrl and Alt and Windows (or our Command and Option and Apple) keys.

Nothing lit up on typewriters. Even much later, when there were electronic typewriters, we could not underscore, italicize or bold, let alone change from Roman to Swiss, serif or sans-serif, without swapping out the daisy wheel, or the type ball on IBM’s Selectrics.

Then computers ushered in ACSCII. Even tube computers and mainframes, properly programmed, were conversant in ASCII. The acronym is for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It worked for storing and displaying text, and for rudimentary formatting. You can find ASCII tables online, and look up the decimal, hexadecimal, binary and glyph values of each printable or control character.

ASCII has given way to Unicode, for most purposes. ASCII covers 128 characters including letters and numerals and some punctuation, while Unicode can handle 65,536, covering many languages, and scientific and math symbols and controls, and extras not yet claimed. All the ASCII characters are included in Unicode, of course, with certain additions such as a null on one end or the other. ASCII characters require a single byte each; Unicode characters need two.

Then there’s HTML with its variants and successors. This is where we start messing with ampersands. HyperText Markup Language and its dialects are for the web, and can be as entangling as if spun by giant spiders.

As for my pal’s experiences with the A’s wearing their fancy modifiers marks, I suspect there was a condensed-keyboard laptop involved somewhere. There are so many ways to encounter strange characters, these days. Just think: you can meet up with me downtown, at a meeting, in a store or club or restaurant, or online, or right here. Some characters are called Dingbats (yes, you could include me); and that includes the bullets I am about to insert with Alt codes (unless something at the other end changes them to asterisks, tsk tsk).

        

Rush Limbaugh and I have something in common. Sort of. He has experienced some hearing problems that could interfere with his work. Me too. He has received a cochlear implant, about 13 years ago, and just had the other ear done. I haven’t. He can afford this very expensive procedure; I can’t. He is wealthy; that’s another difference between Rush and me. I could go on, but I think you can figure it out.

I have very limited peripheral vision, consisting of two jagged visual fields that don’t meet and usually can’t be resolved. I have had poor vision most of my life, and the fields keep shrinking, and there are drop-outs in the fields. Then a couple of years back my left cornea was damaged by an attack of shingles. That was my good eye!

But my “auditory fields” have changed to take in more ambient and peripheral sound, sometimes to the point it seems louder than what I am trying to hear—especially when I am stuck back in a corner, as I am at a school board meeting. My involuntary hearing adaptation has made it harder for me to do my job. Acoustics in the elementary school “Blue Room” are rather dead, anyway, and often there is air movement in the ductwork overhead.

Cochlear implants can be tuned. The sound processor can be programmed. That technology will change many lives, as it becomes more widely available. It certainly has helped Limbaugh.

So far, no brain transplants. But what if they had Vulcan mind-melds? Just imagine, Rush and me...