I’ve always loved ASCII. As a kid, I spent a considerable amount of time studying the code chart that was printed in our Epson dot matrix printer’s user manual.

The one thing that I always sort of wondered, but never really asked myself, was “Why do they leave space between the uppercase letters and lowercase letters?” (I’m talking about [, \, ], ^, -, and `.) I thought it was a little annoying, actually, but I never questioned, because that was just the way it was.

I can’t believe that it is only now that I find out that they wanted the lowercase letters and uppercase letters to have only a one bit difference. For example, the code for N is 4E, and the code for n is 6E. In binary, then, N is 1001110 and n is 1101110. And if you want to change something to all caps? Just change that second 1 to a 0, and you are good.