February 2006
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
6h 16m
English
One of the problems with standards is that there are so many of them. Evensomething as simple as the format of a text file can be subject to many different standards. For example, Microsoft, Apple, and Unix/Linux all use a different end-of-line (EOL) indicator.
The root of this problem can be traced back to the early days, in the 1920s B.C. (before computers). A device called a Teletype was invented to send text over the phone lines at the amazingly fast speed of 10 characters a second (fast for 1920s technology).
The unit consisted of a keyboard, printer, paper tape reader, and punch. It contained a character encoder made out of levers and a character decoder built around a shift register that looked a lot like a car's ...