Have Characters that Depict Electronic Components been Discussed?

[Martin Vahi]

On 8/14/24 23:05, Charlotte Eiffel Lilith Buff wrote:
 >...
 > We no longer live in a world where on-screen text has to be divided
 > into fixed-width cells of a handful of pixels each, or where text
 > characters have to be defined solely based on their precise shape on a
 > particular display device without any underlying semantics, or where
 > the act of drawing a single image to the screen takes up so much memory
 > and processing power that you have to “write” your graphics instead
 > if you want to do anything more complex than a shopping list – and we
 > should be thankful for that.
 >
 > Retro computing is cool and all, but I wouldn’t want to buy a PC with
 > floppy disk drives nowadays.
 >...

Thank You for the answer. About the "retro computing" though, the "cloud
AI" era works largely on Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or some analogues
(bare hardware rental included), where the party that pays the rent for
the computing resources logs in (or uses scripts/bots to log in) to the
rented computing resources over SSH, which uses text based terminal user
interface. In theory one could use some X11/VNC/RDP protocol and spend
a considerable amount of the rented RAM on fancy windowing environment
that will not be used most of the time. The EFFICIENT solution: command
line tools!

At some time in France there was even some community movement, where
VPS's were set up to give out about 100 SSH/login accounts to strangers
so that the strangers could use the computer/VPS as a meeting place and
share thoughs with each other by placing files to that VPS. And indeed
they can also use some retro tools:

     https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/talk.1p.html
     archival copy: https://archive.ph/k6K4u

I'm not saying that people should ignore security issues like they do
at those community building VPS'es, but I am saying that support by
wide variety of tools matters A LOT! For example, all modern general
purpose programming languages support text. Many of them support Unicode
text encoding, UTF8. From software development point of view the
possibility to do graphics by just printing characters adds a really
useful capability TO ALL THOSE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES THAT SUPPORT UTF8.
In "cloud AI" era many applications are command line applications.
A hack to display a tree of computers/VPS-s that run a distributed
application can be implemented by creating folders into each other and
then calling the

     https://linux.die.net/man/1/tree
     archival copy: https://archive.ph/IPqoG

but if some SSH-accessible administration command line utility wants to
display a graph that includes a cycle, then a lot of inventiveness might
be required. That is to say, command line applications are not as retro
as they might seem at first glance.

An alternative is to come up with a new character encoding scheme that
uses Unicode as a sub-set, a lot like the Unicode used ASCII as its
subset.  The new character encoding will need to have then some UTF8
analogue that uses UTF8 as its subset.  Decent mainstream terminal
programs that are meant to be used at the "cloud AI" era must then adapt
that new character encoding scheme and then a program like

     echo "$HAS_THE_VALUE_OF_SOME_FANCY_GRAPHICS_CHARACTER_OR_CHARACTERS"

will work at various Bash scripts. The problem with this approach is
that the various programming language implementations won't adopt it
quickly, but some eventually will. An interim solution might be like
Unicode is supported in ASCII-only C++ strings: special coding.
Easier said than done, but I guess that it's theoretically possible.

Thank You for reading my letter.

Yours sincerely,
Martin.Vahi at softf1.com