My father worked with him at CMU and the story he always told (while possibly apocryphal) was that the reason that the ASCII bell character sequence was CRTL-G was because of Gordon.
it seems somewhat unlikely. let's follow the trail
the existence of bell characters, of course, predates gordon bell's existence itself (they're in the ita2 baudot-murray code from 01932, two years before his birth) so what we're discussing is specifically the assignment of the ascii bell character to the control character corresponding to bell's middle initial
it was already ^g in 01963 according to tom jennings's excellent history https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr...https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 and at that point bell had just started working at dec three years before. however, he was working on serial communications at dec, and had just been doing research at mit, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if he, or friends of his from mit or dec, were to sit on the ansi (then asa) committee
mackenzie's 'coded character sets' from 01980 has a chapter 13 about ascii https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedC... but unfortunately it doesn't go into any detail on the composition of the asa committee. note that mackenzie was the ibm thug who invented ebcdic and spent the 60s and 70s trying to kill ascii, so he devotes most of the book to glorifying that catastrophic error; the book is from 01980, the year before ibm shipped its first ascii-supporting equipment, the ibm pc. it's reasonable to see jennings's account as a violent reaction against mackenzie's book, writing the malignant influence of the punched-card codes out of history entirely, though, as we'll see, the original draft of ascii was designed by a punched-card man
bell's oral history interviews https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270203... don't mention ascii or asa or ansi, so he probably wasn't on the committee, but if it was a connivance by a friend of his, it would be easy to imagine him deliberately not mentioning it
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363831.363839 is an early (01965) publication of what eventually became ascii-1967, but it doesn't list the subcommittee members; the subcommittee seems to have been x3.2 at that point, though the 01963 document was called x3.4-1963
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/06/1963.idg/ says the original proposal was submitted to ansi (though other sources say ansi didn't exist yet) by bob bemer of ibm in 01961. i thought it would be interesting to see if it already had ^g for bel, because bemer would be unlikely to know bell at that point
in 02002 bemer wrote a 52-page history of ascii himself called 'a story of ascii' https://archive.org/details/ascii-bemer which includes a survey of coded character sets from 01960, including the character set used on the 'lincolnwriter' at mit, where bell had been working, and the pdp-1 for which bell designed the uart, as well as another 40 or so. so it wasn't like there was no contact. as it happens, neither of those two character sets includes a bell character
the bell character appears in the first version of the ascii proposal in the leftmost column of table 3 on page 17 — but at position 10, from which it was moved to its current position of 7 (^g) after four revisions (iso/tc97 wg b, 01962 may 4, following x3.2/1, which was 01961 september 18). his only comment on why they moved all the control characters around was, 'the controls were regularized and grouped to 7 transmission controls, 6 format effectors, and 5 device controls; the improvement from the haphazardness of the previous proposals is quite apparent.' this was shortly before ibm sent him to the penalty box for promoting ascii, leading to him quitting to go to univac
at that point there was still disagreement about whether to start the alphabet at the beginning of a 16-codepoint 'column' or, as is done today, one character later, so that a corresponds to 1, b corresponds to 2, etc. so assigning bel to 7 could have ended up with it being ^h. (i'm not clear on whether the ctrl key existed yet, but i'm pretty sure bit-paired keyboards did, on the teletype.)
unfortunately bemer is also largely silent on the membership of the committee, though he does mention particular members from time to time. unless i've overlooked it, he doesn't mention anyone from mit or dec. the iso meeting was an international thing, with delegations from the us and various european countries, and thus seems particularly unlikely to have redesigned the character set to honor a dec engineer, who the committee members would think of as an american engineer
so it's probably just a coincidence, but the evidence i've been able to turn up is not very conclusive
I like that your deep dive into whether this story might be true is the polar opposite of the "too good to check" impulse in journalism & social media, which instead tries to squeeze some attention & entertainment out of a pleasing story before doing any checks that might ruin the illusion.
The grandparent thought this was implausible, researched it as an outsider (with a slight bias towards thinking the claim is false, which is not a problem per se) and still didn't find any refutation. While I applaud the impetus behind the research, I'm more inclined to believe the apocryphal story after reading the attempt to refute it; not every piece of gossip will be supported by a written statement.
while, rationally speaking, a diligent search for evidence regarding a story that comes up finding no evidence for it, and weak evidence against it, ought to make us less inclined to believe the story, people don't always work that way. this is a well-documented cognitive error, commonly called the 'backfire effect', though it doesn't always manifest
i wasn't attempting to refute the story. i was attempting to find out the truth, and i find your summary of that search as 'attempting to refute the apocryphal story' somewhat offensive
my summary of what i found is that the assignment of ^g to the bell control code happened before gordon bell was well-known, on a continent where he did not live, in the deliberations of a standards body he had no involvement with, revising a proposal from a company that competed with his company, before the construction of any software or hardware that used key-chords such as control+g to produce control codes
under these circumstances it is not impossible that one of bell's colleagues from dec made the proposal, or at least was motivated to advocate it by knowing him¹, but given that i couldn't turn up any involvement of dec or mit people in the standards process at all, much less in the delegation the usa sent to europe for the meeting where the change was made, it seems pretty unlikely
______
¹ and predicting the invention of the control key, and that the proposal to start the alphabet at codepoint 64 instead of 65 would fail; but both of these seem to have been fairly predictable
> Gordon Bell (after lunch, it's wonderful having God and Marshall McHulan
here to correct one's self) emailed:
> I did build/invent the first UART in '61, made the Ethernet deal with Intel
and Xerox to have LANs, and DECnet was the first commercial
implementation or ARPAnet, so I have had a long term interest in communcations.
> Every notice that the bell rings when you push ctrl g on the old
teletypes?
> Also, built first commercial timesharing system.
