I found this reply that I made in 1984 to Dennis Ritchie in the net.followup newsgroup. I was at the time lobbying Sun to add 8-bit character set support to the firmware, but they wanted to hold out for a 16-bit system, like the as yet unnamed Unicode. There was eventually an interim solution but my memory of that is a bit foggy.
› ... The problem was that, to the Swedes, characters like
› {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols.
›
› It's a real problem. I gather that the best-equipped users
› had terminals that would switch graphics depending on
› whether they were writing C or documents.
›
› Dennis Ritchie
That's right, writing C and shell commands is almost impossible on a terminal with a swedish character set. Even Pascal is a bit hard, but some compilers will accept (* *) instead of { } and (. .) instead of [ ].
If you have a terminal with selectable character sets, you can train your editor to switch, depending on what type of text you are editing. I have set up EMACS so that it selects the right character set on my VT100 depending on what mode I'm in (which in turn is controlled by filename suffixes). This works even if I have two windows, one with C code in it and the other holding a document in swedish.
Leif Samuelsson
LM ERICSSON Tel. Co.
S-126 25 STOCKHOLM
SWEDEN
..{decvax, philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!leif
"E { e }, } i }a { e |"
"It is a river, and in the river there is an island"
(This is a dialect of swedish. My apologies to the people in the
province of V{rmland for the lack of a V{rmland character set).
TIL why Sun Microsystems (Bill Joy and all) bought an office suite company in 1999. 🤨
"In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems[81][82] for US$59.5 million (equivalent to US$112 million in 2024), reportedly because the acquisition was less expensive than licensing Microsoft Office for Sun's 42,000 employees.[83][84]"
@vkc In 1997 I made a prototype postscript driver for dot matrix printers, based on the NeWS window software, while working in the demo center at #SunMicrosystems HQ.
It didn't lead to anything at the time, but a few years later, someone else had the same idea and so the subsidiary SunPrint, Inc was born. They only focused on "dumb" laser printers, though.