[vox-tech] extended ascii characters

[Rob Rogers]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 20:50:40PM -0700, Jimbo wrote:
> Greetings:
> A few years ago my wife caught a malicious virus that not only wiped
> out the hard drive but also labeled it with a blinking smiley face.  I
> couldn't reformat it since I couldn't duplicate the name of the hard
> drive. I find that this is an extended ASCII character but unable to
> duplicate it via dos.  I find web pages of reference to this character
> but none tell me how to create it.
> 
> I think that I might be able to recreate this smiley face by a
> combination of [alt] and [1-9] keys in either 2 or 10 key strokes.
> Randomly pecking at the keyboard for 5 minutes got me nowhere.
> 
> Does anybody have a clue as to what I am talking about?

Not really sure what this has to do with Linux but....

First I am curious why you can't reformat the hard drive just because
you can't duplicate the name of the hard drive? What tool are you using
to do the formatting with?

As far as "recreating" the smiley face, you have the right idea with
your combination of [alt] and [0-9] (not [1-9]) in a few keystrokes...
I'm not sure exactly where this works and doesn't, but it's been years
since I used it (when I did, it was on Windows) but the combo was to
hold alt and type the 3 digit decimal code for the ascii character you
wished to use. I believe leading zeros were not required, so it's
possible for 2 and even 1 digit codes to work. For the smiley face, the
code is either 001 or 002, depending on whether it's a white or black
face.