From: avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet
Subject: Re: Cyrillic via net
Date: 3 Sep 1992 21:06:35 -0400
Organization: Berkeley Software Design
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In article <KARDANEV.92Sep4011545@hanoi.cern.ch> kardanev@hanoi.cern.ch (A. Kardanev) writes:
>>Yury
>You are not correct, unfortunatly. KOI7 - is usual 7-bit coding
>standart (very old, of course) wich contains only big russian and
>latin letters. (russian letters placed on the place of little latin).
>And as far as I know switch characters like ^n and ^o comes from:
>1. demos V1
>2. from EWM like DWK1, DWK2, and terminal Electronika-B15.
>At least 5 years expirience with they and another dumb-type terminals
>with KOI7 coding give me some rights to say this.

Well, Yury's right. The actual KOI-7 standard contains three
character sets:

	H0	- ASCII

	H1	- codes 00-3F hex as in ASCII,
		  40-5F hex - small cyrillic letters in
		            "phonetic" order corresponding
			    latin letters in ASCII
		  60-7E hex - capital cyrillic letters (except for
			    the capital hard mark)
		  7F	    - DEL

	H0/1	- 00-5F hex - as in ASCII
		  60-7E hex - capital cyrillic letters
		  7F hex    - DEL

You can switch between H0 and H1 using characters SI (^N, H0->H1,
stands for "shift in") and SO (^O, H1->H0, "shift out") or use
H0/1 in which case you loose lowercase letters and characters
{ } | ~ and `.

The now-standard for RELCOM 8-bit code KOI-8 is basically
ASCII in codes 00-7F hex and looks like KOI-7 H1 in codes 80-FF hex.

DEMOS and MNOS use KOI-7 only to deal with terminals with 7-bit
interfaces. Internal code of DEMOS 1.* and 2.* is KOI-8. MNOS
used a variation of KOI-8 with alphabetically sorted characters
(so-called U-code). However, when MNOS and DEMOS teams decided to
merge creating DEMOS rel. 2.* the KOI-8 was choosen as the only
(and still the only) internationally accepted standard for
cyrillic codetable (an extended KOI-8 is called ISO 8859-5).

The "proprietary" operating systems (OS RV (aka RSX-11M), RAFOS/FOBOS
(aka RT-11) etc) which were cloned by Soviet government enterprises
(INEUM et al) used H0/1 because their "designers" were unable to
modify the original software to the extent of making it 8-bit transparent.

Sure, when DEMOS team decided that it makes no sense to continue
development of operating systems for dying Soviet computers, they
(me included :-) switched to network building and created the net
which is called RELCOM (i claim my author rights for this word :-)
No wonder the accepted code is KOI-8.

The now-widespread PC cyrillic codetable variants basically violate
ASCII guidelines for national extensions and therefore still are
not accepted as international standards. They also do not work
with things like ANSI terminals. However, the most-used "alternative"
code (by V.M.Bryabrin (who was my scientific supervisor in Moscow U :-)
and Co. from CC of Acad. of Scinences) fits MS-DOS rather good and
RELCOM software converts to and from this code on MS-DOS machines.
Some people are sending compressed MS-DOS archives (not that it is a
good practice) which contain texts in alternative code with lines
terminated by CR-LF.

The Internet is not inherently 7-bit limited; it's the software you're
using on your machines and software on some major relay nodes like
UUNET. If you have an IP connectivity to Internet you can use full
KOI-8 in SMTP transfers to and from EUnet relay hosts which in turn
will preserve 8 bits sending or receiving data from RELCOM. There is
an 8-bit version of sendmail (called sendmail-IDA) available from
several FTP archives.

USENET relays software (C-news and B-news) and most newsreaders are
8-bit transparent as is. Minor changes are usually required to
get newsreaders to work proiperly with 8-bit Subject: lines.

Finally, there is always a way around -- you can use uuencode to
send arbitrary binary information across even stupidiest networks.

Pressing your local network administrators to install 8-bit transparent
software will help to make Internet a truly international network.

--vadim
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet