Re:A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack
by acheron on Monday December 16, 2013 @12:17PM
(#6916167)
If you're curious why the smiley faces and such were in MS-DOS extended ASCII:
Bill Gates: "... We were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That's why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set into the machine—you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff. We were thinking we'd like to do a clone of Wang word-processing software someday."[1]
Bill Gates: "... We were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That's why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set into the machine—you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff. We were thinking we'd like to do a clone of Wang word-processing software someday."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437