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From: jfriedl@frf.omron.co.jp (NFF)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Summary: Eight bits *are* better than seven.
Message-ID: <455@frf.omron.co.jp>
Date: 21 Jul 90 06:17:59 GMT
References: <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Organization: OMRON Co., Kyoto, Japan.
Lines: 33

In article <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM>, tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
> Either way, 8 bit articles don't
> fix anything fundamentally broken, so I'd concentrate energies elsewhere.

Well, it's certainly not the most important thing [at least to many people],
but not having 8 bits is a pain (for example) for me when I send mail with
Japanese text in it.  I've been able to send mail here around Japan and
not have it stripped, but try anything outside the country and you end
up with a bunch of gook ("gook" -- that's a technical term, in case you
aren't up on your science, for 8-bit text stripped to 7 bits).

Again, maybe for 99.44% of the traffic within The States, it doesn't
matter in this respect, but as so many students^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAmericans
don't seem to know, the world is not only a VAX^H^H^H^H^HAmerica.

minor digression:
  My brother told me about some (I think) circa 1981 Unipress Emacs
  code he was working on long ago which used the high bit as a marker
  for something in the text.  In the code where they were dealing with
  this was the comment: /* sorry japan */
  He always thought that was funny. Me too, now.

	*jeff*
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl                          jfriedl@nff.ncl.omron.jp
Direct path from uunet:                             ...!uunet!othello!jfriedl
Omron Electronics, Central R&D Lab, RNA          Nagaokakyo, Kyoto 617, Japan
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      "sorry, but I can't spell"
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      "current memory prices are 4600$ a megabyte on VAX (4/22/81)"
                                              -- my '/usr/include/vmparam.h'