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From: ruslan@ecsvax.UUCP (Robin C. LaPasha)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: USSR Microcomputers: How far behind US?
Summary: It's worse than just "rascii"
Message-ID: <7088@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: 30 May 89 17:49:33 GMT
References: <1805@orion.cf.uci.edu>
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 47

In article <1805@orion.cf.uci.edu>, dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer) writes:
> 
> Operating systems on some of their MC's are similar to CP/M, MS-DOS, or
> Unix (rare).  One of their Unix-like system is called Demos and my
> books give no information about it.  Of course there are many other
> Russian computer books which I don't have --one of which likely
> describes it.
> 
I talked to some folks from there, and Unix and C are just whispers
on the wind.  However, some folks had used "B" somewhat.  (It's
a predecessor of C, right?)

> If Russians use our software, why shouldn't we use theirs?  One problem
> is the alphabet: ascii vs "rascii" :-) used by the Russians.  All three
> versions of "rascii" (=Russian-American Standard Code for Information
> Interchange :-) ) put the Cyrillic characters into "above ascii" codes
> (128-256 dec.).  The lower codes (32-127) are the same as ascii.  Thus
> US software will work on Soviet computers but not conversely unless the
> "above ascii" codes have been modified to display (or print) the
> appropriate Cyrillic characters (3 "standards" for this).

If the Soviet programmers would really follow the new ISO 8859-5
standard (what I gather you mean by "rascii") it'd be one thing,
but according to what I got at a recent Slavic conference,
it ain't necessarily so.

The commercially popular word processor "Leksikon" (for IBMs)
has a different coding.  (It's apparently a Wordstar knock-off.)
Obviously, the 8-bit machines using the old koi7 standard
(128 chars) have a different coding.  The koi8 standard is
different yet.  It seems that the "Leksikon" version is
winning out for applications, while the ISO standard is
approved for telecommunications.

(Of course, you can't transmit high-bit stuff over the
net consistently, though.  The 8th bit gets truncated
or whatever.  You have to uuencode or otherwise scrunch
things into 7 bits.  Just another level of complexity...)

Oh, then there's keymaps.  I don't even know what the
Soviets use for keymaps (keyboard layouts) on computers,
but the typewriters are set _really_ differently.  Wouldn't
necessarily work out phonetically without a new keymap.
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Robin LaPasha               |Deep-Six your
ruslan@ecsvax.uncecs.edu    |files with VI! ;^) ;^) ;^)