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Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
There's a small house in the moddle of IBM's Code Page 437. Why?
IBM could have followed an existing standard and taken the graphics for control characters from ANSI X3.32-1973—but they are ambiguous and hard-to-use (see part 2 of The origins of DEL (0x7F) and its Legacy in Amiga ASCII art). PETSCII (manually ordered)Even the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) X3.2 committee considered including some "not serious" symbols for an official 8-bit ASCII extension. So, it makes sense that, as IBM was entering the growing market of personal computers, they wanted to signal to the home users that their PC had something fun to offer—hence the "not serious" glyphs, like the smiley, which were added with text-based games in mind.
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