Joey Richards said:
alt-numeric keypad for entry of ascii (or other charset) characters
is a holdover from the DOS days... PCs have always done that as far
as I know (which started with the IBM PC 8088, don't know about before
that)
-------------------------------------------------
The alt-numeric keypad entry of "extended ASCII" (ALT+128 thru 255) is a
function of the IBM PC's keyboard BIOS and has been there since the very
first PC in 1981. Since it's a part of the BIOS it occurs below the
operating system, at least for DOS. Your actual mileage will vary since
later operating systems such as Windows and OS/2 (and I assume Linux)
will subvert the BIOS functions and introduce their own low level
keyboard support and their own mapping to graphic characters.
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
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