Digital Texts / Digital Codes

Primitive Machine-Level Codes That Talk Directly to the Micro-Processor:

Machine Code: the first-generation programming language that talks to the machine directly in binary hexadecimal code (1950s, then addressed by assembler codes)

Assembler Code: the second-generation programming language that is interpreted by the machine code to address the machine directly, a set of mnemonic  abbreviations learned by programmers so that they did not have to write in machine code.  The example contains lines beginning with a semi-colon followed by English language text--the semi-colon warns the computer to ignore the line because it contains instructions for the human programmers who have to maintain the program, otherwise the program would "crash" (fail to execute its instructions).

Higher Text Programming Codes That Tell the Micro-Processor How to Store, Display, and Print Text:

ASCII Code:  Created for Teletype machines that repeated typed news stories from a central location to newsrooms around the world, ASCII characters told these "slave" electronic typewriters what to type, as well as when to indent, skip a line, or ring a bell to signal an important news story.  (United Press International [UPI] rated stories by their bell count: "Bulletin" or "Urgent" stories got five bells; the Kennedy assassination and FDR's death were "Flash" stories, fifteen bells.)  ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, was devised in 1960-63 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) based on well-established teletype codes that had been working since the 1950s.   Because computers can only perform mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, etc., or logical operations that can be represented mathematically (Boolean AND/OR/NOT sorting), all text you see on a computer screen first was a number in machine code which referred to a character in a font table that was, itself, represented by numbers telling the computer what shape to draw on the screen and where to put it.  A capital "A," for instance, is "01000001," and a small "a" is 01100001  When you tell MS-Word to save a file as "Text Only," you are saving only the ASCII characters without other formatting.

Waterloo Script  A pre-WYSISYG (What-You-See[on the screen]-Is-What-You-Get[when you print the document]) word processing system for mainframe computers.   The user had to master at least a basic set of Script mnemonic codes in order to get the document to print out legibly, and those codes would only be activated when the document was sent ("spooled") to the mainframe computer's line printer, a single high-speed device that served the entire community's printing needs.  Printing delays often were measured in hours.  Script reversed the "comment" convention (see Assembler above) so that when the machine saw a period, later a colon, in the left margin, it would assume it was reading a machine instruction code (e.g., ".pp;" for paragraph) and anything following the semi-colon or on  a line that does not begin with a period was treated as plain text.  In time, Script became the basis for GML or Generalized Markup Language, the ancestor of HTML (below) and XML  GML instructions started with a colon in the left margin to distinguish them from Script instructions, but otherwise their logic was very similar to Script's.  Click here for the 1988 student users manual that you would have to read and understand to get a mainframe computer to store and print your manuscript using GML instructions.

HTML  Hyper-Text Markup Language, a descendant of Waterloo Script via "SGML" (Standardized Generalized Markup Language), the first attempt to standardize all digital document formatting, HTML is the standard language used to create web pages.  If you go to your browser window and click on the "View" menu at the top, then click on "View Source," you will see the source code behind the text that is displayed in WYSIWYG on your screen and your printout.  All of that ordinarily remains invisible to the digital text reader, even as the type compositor's assembly of a string of lead type units on a composing stick or the printer's pulling the tympan down upon the paper and plate is invisible to the reader of a printed book, or the scribe's individual pen strokes and preparation of a calf skin to become parchment for writing is invisible to the reader of a manuscript.  Early versions of MS-Word would show users its markup codes, as well, but this word processing program has been WYSIWYG so long that this is no longer considered by Microsoft to be necessary for ordinary users of the program.

XML  Extensible Markup Language (ca. 1998), the current descendant of SGML and Script, this is the newest standard digital code for creating Web based documents and other artifacts, including those which contain video and audio.  XML "tags" look very like those of HTML, but they are language-independent (e.g., non-Roman characters) and they can interrelate information of the same type in many documents.

MARC (a specialized code for running library catalogs): You can see the MARC code for any OLLI search result by clicking on the "MARC Display" on the top menu buttons.  Cataloging librarians tend to find he MARC view easier to read, because it's the form of document they write!