HANK@BARILVM.BITNET.UUCP (02/16/87)
As long as everyone is talking about national language support: We in Israel have a number of problems with TELNET. IBM started out about 18 years ago and came out with a Hebrew code that mapped right on top of all lowercase characters in the EBCDIC character set. That was fairly short sighted on IBM's part and recently they came out with something known as newcode - which maps the 27 hebrew characters to x'41'-x'49', x'51'-x'59', x'62'-x'69', and x'71'. Two years ago they came out with something known as bulletin code which moves some things around again. To make matters worse - other computer manufacturers have their own standard - and even the IBM PC has a different standard in ASCII. On top of that we have the problem of typing right to left rather than left to right. Compounding the problem is mixed language documents (English - Hebrew) and even if you ignore that problem you still have the problem of entering numbers in a Hebrew document. There are various terminal implementations that try to resolve this problem but none have been tested in a TELNET type environment. One day we will have cross that bridge. Hank