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).

I guess it's an age thing, but I thought this was really basic CS knowledge. But I can see why this may be much less relevant nowadays.

Yes, the diagram just shows the ASCII table for the old teletype 6-bit code (and 5-bit code before), with the two most significant bits spread over 4 columns to show the extension that happened while going 5→6→7 bits. It makes obvious what was very simple bit operations on very limited hardware 70–100 years ago.

(I assume everybody knows that on mechanical typewriters and teletypes the "shift" key physically shifted the caret position upwards, so that a different glyph would be printed when hit by a typebar.)

Tangentially related, there is much insight about Unix idioms to be gained from understanding the key layout of the terminal Bill Joy used to create vi

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586980

Going off the timelines on Wikipedia, the first version of ASCII was published (1963) before the 0-9,A-F hex notation became widely used (>=1966):

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#History

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Cultural_history

Currently 'A' is 0x41 and 0101, 'a' is 0x61 and 0141, and '0' is 0x30 and 060. These are fairly simple to remember for converting between alphanumerics and their codepoint. Seems more advantageous, especially if you might be reasonably looking at punchcards.

[0-9A-Z] doesn't fit in 5 bits, which impedes shift/ctrl bits.

I'm not sure if our convention for hexadecimal notation is old enough to have been a consideration.

EDIT: it would need to predate the 6-bit teletype codes that preceded ASCII.

It's more that shift flips that bit. Also I'd call them bit 0 and 1 and not 5 and 6 as 'normally' you count bits from the right (least significant to most significant). But there are lots of differences for 'normal' of course ('middle endian' :-P )

I guess in this system, you'd also type lowercase letters by holding shift?

Modern keyboards = some keyboards. In the Nordic Countries modern keyboards have parantheses on 8 and 9.

What happened to this block and the keyboard key arrangement?

  ESC  [  {  11011
  FS   \  |  11100
  GS   ]  }  11101

What are you trying to achieve, none of those characters are printable, and definetly not going to show up on the web.

    for x in range(0x0,0x20): print(f'({chr(x)})', end =' ')
    (0|) (1|) (2|) (3|) (4|) (5|) (6|) (7|) (8) (9| ) (10|
    ) (11|
          ) (12|
    ) (14|) (15|) (16|) (17|) (18|) (19|) (20|) (21|) (22|) (23|) (24|) (25|)    (26|␦) (27|8|) (29|) (30|) (31|)

Ok this set does not even show on Android, just some boxes. Very strange.