On Saturday,  9 March 2002 at 18:14:20 -0500, der Mouse wrote:
>> [...], but later they moved to 9 bit ASCII.
>
> ...isn't ASCII 7 bit by definition?  Or is "9 bit ASCII" an
> abbreviation for "ASCII in the low 7 bits of a 9-bit field"?

Yes.  

> (And in that case, I'm curious: what did the other 3/4 of the
> possible values mean, do you happen to know?)

I suppose they later moved to ISO 8859-<foo>, but until then both of
the high-order bits were set to 0.  Considering that this happened in
the early 70s, I'd guess that the results of using one of the
undefined characters would be, well, undefined.

Greg
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