To: MPAUL AT ibh DOT rwth-aachen DOT de Cc: opendos AT delorie DOT com References: <73CAF1FD5 AT ibh DOT rwth-aachen DOT de> Message-Id: Organization: International Brownian Movement From: "-= ArkanoiD =-" Date: Sat, 5 Apr 97 04:05:14 +0300 Subject: Re: A vote for I18n (was Re: YesChar) Lines: 70 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit nuqneH, > From: "Matthias Paul" > Organization: IBH, RWTH-Aachen > To: opendos AT delorie DOT com > Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 19:17:43 GMT+0100 > Subject: A vote for I18n (was Re: YesChar) > Reply-to: Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de [dd] > > But in Eastern Europe, in Far East, in South America, and in Africa > the situation is much different. Computers are still a priviledge > of the elite. Most of them were happy to own a computer at all, not > to speak of what we call 'state-of-the-art-hardware'. For example, > in Russia, home computers like the legacy Sinclair ZX81 ZX Spectrum exactly. BTW i never liked it. Russian home computers were much better than that ugly not-very-computerlike videogamish basic-programmed device. > are very wide > spread. Were. Things changed much. That happened ~93 or so. > Fortunately since some years, this is changing rapidly, IMHO > caused by the immense grow of the Internet. But concerning spread of > PC computers, many countries are still 10 years in back, so DOS is > very attractive there. No. That's not because we are "10 years back" - that's not true at all - just i do not think Windoze is somehow.. even a minute "ahead" of DOS. > Another problem of localization are input and output systems. > > Most people from the US and other English speaking countries > do not/cannot realize, which problems people from foreign countries > might have with the keyboard input and screen/printer output. > > Using a US keyboard layout and a screen font of 437, many were > not able to use a PC and write texts in their mother language. > The US keyboards offer only a small subset of the characters > used in other languages. Some could not even reach all the > characters needed if they would try to type them in all in via the > +NumPad method. Therefore, other codepages are needed in many > countries (and we have to expand this capability). > We have our own keyboard and screen drivers - and most of us do not use generic DOS language support at all. > That's, why I didn't liked the example with the monitor turned upside > down... Just imagine trying to write a text with your own keyboard, > but half the keys were missing and the other half was rearranged. > But of course, you could type it in octet notation, were this keyboard > was optimized for. Further, the software was telling you to press > , but actually, you'd have to press . Also, you could not > directly read a text on the monitor but could see only it's image in > a mirror... Would you still be a computer fan? BTW pressing "Y" for most of the people around here is much more easy than pressing "D" (cyrillic? latin? which one? should i change current keyboard language? What to do i if forgot to load keyboard driver?) People who need total localization here will not use DOS. They run "latest" version of Windoze on "best" computers. --- _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Must be a visit from the dead.. _| o |_ | | _|| | / _||_| |_ |_ |_ CU in Hell .......... Arkan#iD |_ o _||_| _||_| / _| | o |_||_||_|