28,800 bit/s V.34

[Drewbert]

Originally Posted by sbe18

My 89 year old mom....
found my Timex Sinclair 1000 in the basement of her house last summer....

I can't remember if the TImex was a rebadge of the ZX-80 or ZX-81.

They had those horrible membrane keyboards but had intelligent autocomplete - if basic was expecting a command word where you were typing, certain keys defaulted to type out the complete command.

Made the keyboard less annoying and made for fast typing of basic programs.



The Spectrum had a (slightly) better rubber keyboard. I hard wired in a real keyboard off some sort of old terminal anyway so never used the spectrum keyboard.

[blastfromthepast]

Originally Posted by Drewbert

Don't tell me those symbols aren't typeable!

[alpha]

Originally Posted by domainguru

At school in the UK we had Sharp machines, forget the model name, nice integrated screen

Originally Posted by Gammascalper

I do remember the Brits churning out some good early PCs. Acorn or something rings a bell.

So you'll remember the BBC model "A" and "B" then? Can't remember for the life of me the difference between A and B.
The only thing I remember about these computers was there was a "trick" going around school where 3 lines of code would set the thing into a loop, resulting in some kind of relay crazily clicking on/off until it burnt out. I'll never forget that sound of 10+ clicking relays, and the smell of burnt out PCBs followed by the screams of a teacher discovering the carnage.. ahh, the good ole days.

Originally Posted by Drewbert

I can't remember if the TImex was a rebadge of the ZX-80 or ZX-81...

The ZX-80... grrrr. That thing still gives me nightmares.. I remember buying a computer mag and typing in the endless lines of code for this "game", it must have taken me all summer, and of course the damn thing never compiled.
Of course these days, we'd just outsource it to rentacoder for some kid in Russia to type in.

[techde]

I got too much interesting stuff on your blog. I guess I am not the only one having all the enjoyment here! Keep up the good work.

[bwhhisc]

Originally Posted by techde

I got too much interesting stuff on your blog. I guess I am not the only one having all the enjoyment here! Keep up the good work.

The forum is a treasure trove of interesting posts and information going way back to 2005......the 2nd heyday of IDNs.

IDNs never took off once Verisign "split" the idn.com and the idn.idn and allowed them to go to 2 owners, not to mention problems with email and punycode vs. unicode in the brower window and the jackasses using IDNs for phishing.

But.....i still think they will have a place in the future if some of that gets sorted out.
I would rather hold idn.com than the same idn.idn although having both would definately be best if you plan to develop.

Other comments appreciated.

[andre]

Originally Posted by bwhhisc

The forum is a treasure trove of interesting posts and information going way back to 2005......the 2nd heyday of IDNs.

IDNs never took off once Verisign "split" the idn.com and the idn.idn and allowed them to go to 2 owners, not to mention problems with email and punycode vs. unicode in the brower window and the jackasses using IDNs for phishing.

But.....i still think they will have a place in the future if some of that gets sorted out.
I would rather hold idn.com than the same idn.idn although having both would definately be best if you plan to develop.

Other comments appreciated.

A major hurdle for IDNs and EAI has been the lack of support in software which expected and assumed domain names and email addresses would consist of ASCII characters only. This has been ongoing problem for many years.

The situation though has definitely and significantly improved with more and more evident support for IDNs and EAI. An important ICANN group is https://uasg.tech which has achieved much in encouraging and facilitating technical support and solutions for IDNs and EAI. Many companies are now onboard with respect to providing support for IDNs and EAI.

It is still, though, a long term initiative. I consider it will still be a number of years before IDNs and EAI work seamlessly across ALL software and systems.

Personally, for example, I still, after so many years, encounter software that cannot handle the diacritic in my given name André.

So, it is not just IDNs and EAI that are not yet fully supported in software and the internet. Software and the internet is not yet fully and seamlessly internationalised and localised. It has improved dramatically over the years but there is still much left to achieve. There are still interesting and rewarding challenges ahead.

IDNForums plays an important part in achieving the ambitious goal of internationalisation and localisation of software and the internet. I wonder how many people have first learned of IDNs from this forum?

André Schappo
https://고.한국/crocs

[Avtal]

I agree with André that a major problem is the lack of software support for IDNs. No end-user business wants its customers to see punycode when they visit the business's web site or receive email from the business.

Part of the software-support problem is due to developer laziness or unawareness, but part is a deliberate design decision to "protect" users from spoofing. For instance, the Safari browser on iPhones shows punycode instead of Unicode if the IDN is not in the user's language (at least, I just ran a simple-minded test and that is what I think it showed). Firefox and Chrome, on the other hand, seem to be more sophisticated in how they detect malicious IDNs.

So if you are a business thinking of obtaining an IDN, you might hesitate if a significant portion of your customer base uses iPhones, and if some of these iPhones are likely to be set to a different language.

The situation with email is gradually improving, at least for IDNs to the right of the @ sign. Unicode to the left of the @ is still unsupported for the most part.

If you are interested in learning in great detail what progress is being made, I recommend the site that André mentioned:
https://uasg.tech
They have a lot of detailed up-to-date information on which software currently supports IDNs, and to what degree:
https://uasg.tech/information/developers/

If you are interested in all the technical hurdles that must be overcome (and have, for the most part, been overcome, but not widely deployed) in order to allow unicode email addresses to the left of the @ sign, see this PDF:
https://uasg.tech/wp-content/uploads...en-digital.pdf

One other, less significant, but rather annoying obstacle to the adoption of IDNs is that Verisign has still not implemented its .com equivalents in Russian and Chinese, 6 years or more after they were allocated by ICANN!

Avtal