@Jesse_b yes, they still do, and keyboards don’t output ASCII, they output scan codes

@Fabby snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots

@StephenKitt Se non è vero, è ben trovato...

(Italian saying)

Even if it's not true, it's well found...

@Fabby LOL Only the Italians for having that saying ;)

@StephenKitt I still dealt with the Spectrum where the keyboard had not a smart controller giving scan codes, and the CPU had to poll the I/O ports corresponding to 8? half-rows ;) in each 50ms interrupt ;)

8 keyboard half-rows

@StephenKitt I didn't say keyboards output ascii (at least I don't think I did). I said computers speak in binary and ascii is simply a standard used to convert binary to letters/symbols

@Jesse_b the above gave me the impression you were suggesting that the keyboard controller was used to convert bits to letters, using ASCII

@StephenKitt Well I thought that was the purpose of the controller but controller =/= keyboard

But yeah I guess it just handles the cpu interrupt to forward the information on

It’s the OS’s job to translate key codes, typically into keyboard events nowadays, which can encode UTF-8 characters but also lots of other stuff — volume up/down, shift, ctrl, alt, etc.

Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to support different keymaps...

Makes sense. I took an intro to computers class like 20 years ago that I barely remember and seem to remember the keyboard controller wrong :p

IIRC though there was something about the old ones that created the 255 (or 252-254) key limit that has since been eliminated

(presumably something to do with being 8 bit)

or actually I think they had a 127 key limit

There’s an 8-bit limit in the X protocol somewhere, but keyboard controllers have been capable of using multi-byte sequences for a long, long time — the AT keyboard could (I don’t remember off-hand if the PC or XT keyboards could)

Does anyone know a way to nicely format an mbox file (basically corresponding to an email folder) such as produced by "traditional" MUAs like Pine/Alpine, Mutt etc., in PDF form?

(and attachments)

@StephenKitt Thanks for the tip. I didn't consider attachments. or UTF-8, for that matter.

I guess one could skip attachments. It's not clear how those should be handled in general.

But really, so much text mail is malformed in different ways, that poses a sufficient challenge. E.g. HTML mail.

I was thinking that this is something that maybe a TeX variant could handle. Something with basic parsing abilities. LuaTeX, perhaps. But I don't see any evidence that something like that exists.

Theo de Raadt does have a sense of humour. He sent both >this< and >this< today. He must be in a good mood :-)

@Kusalananda Personally I think the running Linux option sounds good.

@FaheemMitha For most people it is the best option.

Unless Windows is better for them.

@FaheemMitha I have a couple machines with FreeBSD....;)