80 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
80 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
STANDARDS
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You know what I think? I think that people are not taking this
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standards thing very seriously.
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Standards are important things, you know. Ignoring Gregorian chants,
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Ben Franklin was among the first to use standards. He recommended the use
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of interchangeable parts in rifles. This reduced their downtime, increased
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their performance, and considerably increased their repairability.
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Imagine living in the olden times and breaking a part on your rifle:
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He: Hey Rachel, the flintlock's broken.
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She: Bad news, Harry. Our gunsmith, Withers, passed away last year.
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You're going to have to get a whole new gun.
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He: You mean no one has a new flintlock?
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She: Nope, they're one-of-a-kind. Only Withers knew how ours worked.
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Ben had many good ideas. Henry Ford carried them to perfection.
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So where are we now? There are standards everywhere, you know. Every
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time you look at a screw, a nail, a brick, a board ... all are manufactured
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to standard sizes. (NB: Some standards are ``soft'', e.g., the 2.54 cm
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nail standard).
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Computer manufacturers kind of have standards. Consider characters. I
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learned on a Bendix G-15. It had the extended character set option and
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could actually print letters instead of just numbers. This was a startling
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innovation (all the more startling due to its blazing speed - three
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characters/second!). The G-15 had 29-bit words and bizarre encoding for the
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characters. The coding scheme died a merciful death.
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By the 60's, the ASCII code emerged. You know: the American Standard
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Code for Information Interchange. All American manufacturers were to adhere
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to it voluntarily. Every one of them. Except CDC, which was busy with 6-
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bit character codes, 10 per word. Except PLATO, CDC machines which had
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variable length characters (6 to 24 bits). Except UNIVAC; they used ``field
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data'', more six bit characters. Not too many special characters there,
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nosirree! Case distinctions? Who needs it! They also had the ``quarter-
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word'' format which stored four 9-bit characters. That was enough for
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upper/lower case and some exciting nonstandard graphics. Except DEC. Their
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DECsystem-10 had a scheme which encoded characters using a MOD-50 scheme.
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Innovative.
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And: except IBM. They decided to use EBCDIC instead. Terrific.
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Instead of the ISO or any other standard, they had a new kind: the de facto
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standard. The phrase ``de facto'' means ``everyone does it this way so it
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doesn't matter what you think.'' IBM is real big on de facto standards.
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Time passed; the world turned around once every day. Soon people found
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that the fewer ways there were to do a given thing (e.g., character codes)
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the more productive they could be. The world of computers has seen many
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standards emerge in recent years. Early on, tape formats standardized, thus
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enhancing interchange of data among various systems. Local area networks
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fueled the need for standards as each manufacturer found they needed to meet
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some level of compatibility or die. The personal computer world has almost
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achieved the world of plug-and-play for some kinds of peripherals and
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computers. What an amazing world we now live in.
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So what's the complaint? I'll tell you the complaint: the very word
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``standard'' is now bandied about as if it means ``latest way we invented to
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do something.'' When's the last time YOU said, ``Oh, I think I'll invent a
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new page-description language; we can make it a standard!'' Or maybe:
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``Gosh, I don't think there's enough network file systems in the world;
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let's have a NEW STANDARD.'' AT&T tried that one. Oops.
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Standards are hard. Either you have to let one guy (maybe two if
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they're friends) do it or you have to have a ``committee''. Committees can
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do it: it's been proven. Unfortunately, they take longer. The last
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FORTRAN standard took 10 years. The next one, currently dubbed FORTRAN 8x
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may not make it! It may turn out to be FORTRAN 9x. How disappointing.
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At any rate, while companies like IBM can create de facto standards
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just because they sell some substantial fraction of every computer in the
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world, that doesn't mean just anyone can.
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Let's all see how we can cooperate in the coming year and have just a
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few standards - a few good ones.
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