Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!shelby!neon!kaufman
From: kaufman@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Re: 134.5 baud == IBM 2741 (was: Re: Why 300 baud?)
Message-ID: <1990Jun2.160304.27508@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 Jun 90 16:03:04 GMT
References: <1990May31.025608.18545@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <KINDRED.90May31185056@pyrite.telesci.UUCP> <61463@sgi.sgi.com>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 19

In article <61463@sgi.sgi.com> rpw3@sgi.com (Rob Warnock) writes:

>Of course, the 2741 wasn't all that easy to deal with:

>- And of course, the character set wasn't within *miles* of ASCII,
>  and wasn't even EBCDIC, but something all its own. (For example,
>  the 2741 sent the bits in a byte backwards from TTYs.)

There were actually two different 2741 characters sets:  Selectric code,
which was basically the shift-tilt-rotate bits for the type ball, encoded
in a character, and EBCD (Extended BCD), which was more like the code IBM
used on its computers.  You could generally tell which one was being used
by artful parsing of the login sequence.

For a long time, most car rental companies used Selectric based terminals
for typing contracts (remember Wizard of AVIS?).  After all, show me a
dot-matrix or thermal printer that can do 3 carbons reliably.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@Neon.stanford.edu)