Garbage Collected

Also worth noting: Ctrl+[ = ESC in ASCII, which is where the keyboard shortcut comes from. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/

Basically the .plan file revived (: [1] John Carmack was well-known for keeping his development notes and other thoughts in a .plan file[2][3] Aside: it saddens me a little how the simple idea of copying files onto a server is so many steps removed from modern "web framework" behemoths. I think some people genuinely don't know about the simpler older ways, and the pros and cons between them. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/122782/what-is-plan-for-users [2] https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ [3] https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan

Everything old is new again: John Carmack's .plan¹: https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ Archive: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive ¹ https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc742

I am a fan of the 4-column style, which what you are saying, separating into 2 bits & 5. I think it's alot more intuitive to see the modifiers in action https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/

Seriously? I've kept daily logs (on and off) since around 2002 when I first discovered John Carmack's .plan files. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/

Back in the day John Carmack's .plan file was my social media feed. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ There's a table in the above link, as well as a few more details

fun fact: 2FA QR codes contain the secret as just part of a url. you don't need to save the binary image, just figure out what the (usually base32-encoded) secret value is, and store that. google authentcator lets you type in the base32-encoded secret (useful if your phone's camera is broken). see e.g. https://garbagecollected.org/2014/09/14/how-google-authenticator-works…

That's not what I'm saying at all. ASCII is just a standard for how text is encoded into binary. However it hasn't been around forever and before it there were lots of different -incompatible- standards. It was so bad that some computers would have their own proprietary character set. Some computers also didn't even have 8 bits to a byte and since a byte was the unit for each character (albeit ASCII is technically 7bit but lets not get into that here), it meant systems with 6 or 7 bits to a byte would be massively incompatible as you're off by one or two bits on each character, which multiplies up with each subsequent character. This meant that text files were often fundamentally incompatible across different systems (I'm not talking like weird character rendering; I'm talking about the file looking like random binary noise). ASCII changed a lot of that and did so with what was, in my opinion at least, a beautiful piece of design. I did a quick bit of googling around to find a supporting article about the history of ASCII: http://ascii-world.wikidot.com/history There was also some good discussions on HN a little while ago about the design of ASCII, I think this was one of the referenced articles: https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/ The history of ASCII is really quite interesting if you're into old hardware.

A couple of other nice links: Four Column ASCII: https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/ (and associated HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13539552) The Evolution of Character Codes, 1875-1968: https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii (and associated Github repo: https://github.com/e-n-f/ascii) Bob Bemer, consider the "Father of ASCII", died in 2004 and his website has gone offline. The Wayback Machine has archives. It looks like the last one that was his website (before the current squatter) was: https://web.archive.org/web/20180511201723/http://bobbemer.com/