unfortunately this page is based on mackenzie's book. mackenzie is the ibm guy who spent decades trying to kill ascii, promoting its brain-damaged ebcdic as a superior replacement (because it was more compatible, at least if you were already an ibm customer). he spends most of his fucking book trumpeting the virtues of ebcdic actually
bob bemer more or less invented ascii. he was also an ibm guy before mackenzie's crowd pushed him out of ibm for promoting it. he wrote a much better book about the history of ascii which is also freely available online, really more a pamphlet than a book, called "a story of ascii": https://archive.org/details/ascii-bemer/page/n1/mode/2up
tom jennings, who invented fido, also wrote a history of ascii, called 'an annotated history of some character codes or ascii: american standard code for information infiltration'; it's no longer online at his own site, but for the time being the archive has preserved it: https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr...
jennings's history is animated by a palpable rage at mackenzie's self-serving account of the history of ascii, partly because bemer hadn't really told his own story publicly. so jennings goes so far as to write punchcard codes (and mackenzie) out of ascii's history entirely, deriving it purely from teletypewriter codes—from which it does undeniably draw many features, but after all, bemer was a punchcard guy, and ascii's many excellent virtues for collation show it
as dwheeler points out, the accomplished informatics archivist eric fischer has also written an excellent history of the evolution of ascii. though, unlike bemer, fischer wasn't actually at the standardization meetings that created ascii, he is more careful and digs deeper than either bemer or jennings, so it might be better to read him first: https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii/
it would be a mistake to credit ascii entirely to bemer; aside from the relatively minor changes in 01967 (including making lowercase official), the draft was extensively revised by the standards committees in the years leading up to 01963, including dramatic improvements in the control-character set
bob bemer more or less invented ascii. he was also an ibm guy before mackenzie's crowd pushed him out of ibm for promoting it. he wrote a much better book about the history of ascii which is also freely available online, really more a pamphlet than a book, called "a story of ascii": https://archive.org/details/ascii-bemer/page/n1/mode/2up
tom jennings, who invented fido, also wrote a history of ascii, called 'an annotated history of some character codes or ascii: american standard code for information infiltration'; it's no longer online at his own site, but for the time being the archive has preserved it: https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr...
jennings's history is animated by a palpable rage at mackenzie's self-serving account of the history of ascii, partly because bemer hadn't really told his own story publicly. so jennings goes so far as to write punchcard codes (and mackenzie) out of ascii's history entirely, deriving it purely from teletypewriter codes—from which it does undeniably draw many features, but after all, bemer was a punchcard guy, and ascii's many excellent virtues for collation show it
as dwheeler points out, the accomplished informatics archivist eric fischer has also written an excellent history of the evolution of ascii. though, unlike bemer, fischer wasn't actually at the standardization meetings that created ascii, he is more careful and digs deeper than either bemer or jennings, so it might be better to read him first: https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii/
it would be a mistake to credit ascii entirely to bemer; aside from the relatively minor changes in 01967 (including making lowercase official), the draft was extensively revised by the standards committees in the years leading up to 01963, including dramatic improvements in the control-character set
for the historical relationship between ascii character codes and keyboard layouts, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard