alt Hacker NewsFor me was interesting that all digits in ASCII starts with 0x3, eg. 0x30 - 0, 0x31 - 1, ..., 0x39 - 9. I thought it was accidental, but in real it was intended. This was giving possibility to build simple counting/accounting machines with minimal circuit logic with BCD (Binary Coded Decimals). That was wow for me ;)
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zahlman • today at 8:03 AM
And this is exactly why I find the usual 16x8 at least as insightful as this proposed 32x4 (well, 4x32, but that's just a rotation).
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I still wonder if it wouldn't have been better to let each digit be represented by its exact value, and then use the high end of the scale rather than the low end for the control characters. I suppose by 1970 they were already dealing with the legacy of backwards-compatibility, and people were already accustomed to 0x0 meaning something akin to null?