jer%vanderbilt.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (06/08/84)
From: Eric Roskos <jer%vanderbilt.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> I disagree strongly with the criticism of the IBM PC's character sets; the problem is entirely in the software implementation. Clearly it is better to have two character sets available than one; thus, for instance, I can write in English yet properly address envelopes to my foreign correspondents even though a kludge is necessary. If I only had English letters, that would not be possible. The easy fix is to produce a new ROM for the display, perhaps swapping the English ANSI-standard characters with the Swedish standard characters so the english ones are in the high-numbered positions. Of course it's not easy if one doesn't have a way to make ROMs, but, free enterprise being what it is, it's almost certain someone has such a ROM already. But, to criticize more directly the problem at hand. I agree with the spirit of your complaint, if not its exact conclusions. When the IBM PC came out, people kept saying "it has a programmable display/keyboard." True, but to do it you have to type in the entire text of the ROM BIOS driver so you can change and reassemble it. Having done so, however, you can easily install your new one in RAM in place of the old one. The problem is that for some reason, I guess probably reliability, IBM put its translation tables (for the keyboard) in ROM, and didn't provide any real way to remap the display. (I realize this can be done, but I am saying that there is no STANDARD way, no ROM BIOS call for doing it.). Thus, while the 8088 has a nice translation instruction for doing it, there isn't a translation table available for it. In this respect, it would have been enormously better if IBM had COMPLETELY designed its own character set -- then, like the completely nonstandard keyboard character set, they would have at least have had to provide a translation table, even though it probably would have been in ROM.