Re: “plain text styling”…

[William_J_G Overington]

Kent Karlsson wrote as follows.


> But yes, historically there have been other control/escape sequence 
> definitions for various types of equipments from different 
> manufacturers.

I remember that back in the late 1980s or early 1990s in the computing 
laboratory where I worked at the time, where there were at that time 
mostly ordinary monochrome text terminals each linked to a mainframe 
computer, a then rather expensive colour graphics terminal was 
purchased.

This connected to the mainframe computer in exactly the same way as an 
ordinary monochrome text terminal.

The way that one used the colour graphics was by programming, in a 
program written in, say, Pascal, that was compiled and run on the 
mainframe computer, software that would send a (base 10 used then and 
here) character 27 followed by a sequence of characters. If I remember 
correctly, one such sequence started with a [ character and ended with a 
] character. I do not remember whether each sequence type was between [ 
and ] or whether sequences each started and finished each differently, 
such as ( to ) and { to }. I think some graphics commands might have 
been just a character 27 followed by a single character so as, to, say, 
change the colour of the drawing pen to a particular preset colour, but 
I am not sure of that.

I remember that it was very straightforward to use those sequences in a 
computer program and various people produced some very good results 
using the colour graphics terminal.

I do not know whether the sequences used were specific to that 
particular product or if they were part of a standard, whether a de jure 
standard or a de facto standard, or just some informal quasi-standard 
generated in a Usenet newsgroup or the like.

William Overington

Wednesday 11 January 2023


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20230111/675f2bc5/attachment.htm>