It seems like only yesterday that you had a dozens of choices in what computer you could buy. Most were not compatible with the others — and we liked it that way. Software companies, however, probably didn’t. To reach the largest market, they had to write their program multiple times for different systems. My Radio Shack Color Computer, sadly, did not get many of these official ports.

Side note: For a nice list of some of the official ports we actually did get, see this listing by Curtis Boyle.

Many things we take for granted today — such as sending text from one computer to another (via e-mail, text, etc.) — were not as simple back then. Not all systems used an industry standard character set, meaning the numeric code that represented a character on one system, might represent a different character on another.

The CoCo used ASCII – “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” The defined numeric values represented the following characters in this clear and easy to understand chart:

If that chart doesn’t help, you are not alone. Just know that characters 0 to 127 were all defined to represented a standard set of letters, numbers, punctuation, symbols and control codes (such as 8 being BACKSPACE, 13 being CARRIAGE RETURN, etc.).

System like the Atari 400/800 and Commodore PET/VIC-20/64/etc. included non-ASCII graphical symbols in their character set. Each of these systems came up with their own standard — PETSCII from Commodore (which originated on the Commodore PET in 1977), and ATASCII from Atari (which originated on the Atari 400/800 in 1979).

Before WWW there was BBS

One of the first things I ever did with a computer was use one with a modem to dial other computers over a land line telephone. (Kid’s, ask your parents…) Folks would run Bulletin Board System software that let others call their computer and post messages for other folks to read who called in later.

This presented a problem. If the character sets were different between computers, how could an ASCII CoCo user dial in to an Atari ATASCII system or a Commodore PETSCII system?

To solve this problem, some BBS programs on the non-ASCII computers would first ask you if you wanted ASCII or ATASCII (or PETSCII or whatever). For ASCII users, the BBS would then translate the character codes.

Not all systems did this, of course. There were plenty of Commodore-only and Atari-only systems that made use of the extended character set to draw fancy menus and screens that ASCII computers couldn’t view.

However, the modem “terminal programs” that non-ASCII systems ran usually had an ASCII translation mode built in. Thus, a Commodore or Atari user could call any ASCII BBS. While I am sure they existed, I never did see a terminal program for my ASCII CoCo that let it call an ATASCII or PETSCII-only system. (TwilightTerm by SockMaster is similar, allowing a CoCo 3 to view the IBM PC ANSI character set and colors.)

When I lived in Lufkin, Texas, one of the local BBSes was running on an Atari 800 (via BBS Express software) and allowed ASCII systems to call in. This was how I first learned about the differences in ATASCII versus ASCII.

Here is what ASCII characters 32-127 looked like on the CoCo 1 and 2 (characters 0-31 are control codes and such):

And here is the same set of characters on a CoCo 3 40-column screen with row and column numbers (since I had more screen room):

From wikipedia, here is what ATASCII looks like:

I think this table is much easier to read that the ASCII one, as long as you know hexadecimal.

Starting at character 32 (0x20) is a space, followed by special characters and the alphabet. Although there are some symbol differences (like the ^ on CoCo being a diamond on the Atari), the main letters, numbers and symbols are the same.

But, if I were to write up a text file and send it to the Atari BBS so they could post it, it would not work. ASCII uses 13 (CR, carriage return) as a line ending, but ATASCII uses 155 (ATASCII CR). If I translated line endings, and avoided using things like ^, brackets (or curly braces), etc., I could then have a text file the Atari BBS could use.

The amazing ASCII to ATASCII Convert program!

So I wrote a simple ASCII to ATASCII converter:

0 REM ASCII TO ATASCII CONVERT
1 REM BY ALLEN HUFFMAN
2 REM (09/02/87)
3 REM
5 CLEAR1000
10 CLS:PRINT@3,"ASCII TO ATASCII CONVERTER":PRINT@40,"BY ALLEN HUFFMAN":PRINTSTRING$(32,131)
15 PRINT@96,"ASCII FILE TO CONVERT:":LINEINPUT">";F1$:IFF1A$=""THEN15
20 PRINT@192,"NAME OF NEW FILE:":LINEINPUT">";F2$:IFF2$=""THEN15
25 PRINT@289,"CONVERTING ASCII TO ATASCII...":OPEN"I",#1,F1$:OPEN"O",#2,F2$
30 LINEINPUT#1,A$:PRINT@320,A$:PRINT#2,A$+CHR$(155);:IFEOF(1)=0THEN30
35 PRINT#2,CHR$(26);:UNLOAD
40 PRINT@422,"CONVERSION COMPLETE!":END

In line 15, it asks for an INPUT filename (F1$).

In line 20, it asks for an OUTPUT file name (F2$).

In line 25, it opens the first file as input (“I”) and the second file for output (“O”).

In line 30, it loops reading a raw line from the first file, displaying it on the screen (so the user can see what is going on), then writes the text out to the output file with a CHR$(155) at the end and NO ASCII carriage return (by using the semicolon). If end-of-file is not reached, it goes back to 30 to process the next line.

In line 35, it writes out a final CHR$(26) (control-Z) to the ATASCII output file — but I do not recall why. It then uses the UNLOAD command to close any open files.

I had to look up UNLOAD, as I had forgotten this existed. The description reads:

“Closes any open files on the disk in the drive you specify. If you do not specify a drive number, the com­puter uses Drive 0 (or the drive you specified in the DRIVE command).”

Disk Extended BASIC manual

Not much to it, but it worked and it let me write bulletins and such that I could upload to the Atari BBS.

I thought I would share this code in case any CoCo user out there needs to upload some text files to an Atari BBS.

Until next time…