Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Code page 437" in English language version.
If you look at the first 32 characters in the IBM PC character set you'll see lots of whimsical characters — smiley face, musical notes, playing card suits and others. These were intended for character based games [...] Since we were using 8-bit characters we had 128 new spots to fill. We put serious characters there — three columns of foreign characters, based on our Datamaster experience. Three columns of block graphic characters [...] many customers with Monochrome Display Adapter would have no graphics at all. [...] two columns had math symbols, greek letters (for math) and others [...] about the first 32 characters (x00-x1F)? [...] These characters originated with teletype transmission. But we could display them on the character based screens. So we added a set of "not serious" characters. They were intended as display only characters, not for transmission or storage. Their most probable use would be in character based games. [...] As in most things for the IBM PC, the one year development schedule left little time for contemplation and revision. [...] the character set was developed in a three person 4-hour meeting, and I was one of those on that plane from Seattle to Atlanta. There was some minor revision after that meeting, but there were many other things to design/fix/decide so that was about it. [...] the other participants in that plane trip were Andy Saenz — responsible for the video card, and Lew Eggebrecht — the chief engineer for the PC.
If you look at the first 32 characters in the IBM PC character set you'll see lots of whimsical characters — smiley face, musical notes, playing card suits and others. These were intended for character based games [...] Since we were using 8-bit characters we had 128 new spots to fill. We put serious characters there — three columns of foreign characters, based on our Datamaster experience. Three columns of block graphic characters [...] many customers with Monochrome Display Adapter would have no graphics at all. [...] two columns had math symbols, greek letters (for math) and others [...] about the first 32 characters (x00-x1F)? [...] These characters originated with teletype transmission. But we could display them on the character based screens. So we added a set of "not serious" characters. They were intended as display only characters, not for transmission or storage. Their most probable use would be in character based games. [...] As in most things for the IBM PC, the one year development schedule left little time for contemplation and revision. [...] the character set was developed in a three person 4-hour meeting, and I was one of those on that plane from Seattle to Atlanta. There was some minor revision after that meeting, but there were many other things to design/fix/decide so that was about it. [...] the other participants in that plane trip were Andy Saenz — responsible for the video card, and Lew Eggebrecht — the chief engineer for the PC.
