Wow this is a beautiful article. I love Code page 437 - my first experiences with computers used it. I made two little things that are a homage to the pixelated and "cyberpunk" "screaming electron" "information superhighway" glory that is IBM Code Page 437:
1. Endless scrolling random Code Page 437 text: https://o0101.github.io/random/ (but it seems to be broken indicated by an overabundance of the non-existent "block question mark". Code here in case anyone wants to submit a fix :) : https://github.com/o0101/random)
2. Base-437 - a way to encode any binary file into faithful-to-code-page-437-glyphs that you can nevertheless throw into HTML no problemo: https://browserbox.github.io/Base437/This means, for instance, you can have a "data:image/png;base437,ëPNG♪◙→◙ ♪IHDR ◘♠ \r¿f ♦gAMA Åⁿa♣ cHRM z& Çä · ÇΦ u..." URI for an image. I just think it looks cool being able to see the content rather than base64 which hides it. Code: https://github.com/BrowserBox/Base437
I still have most of the 437 code points memorised. At one point, I made a simple program similar to xxd or od but which would dump the binary code ones in (Unicode) 437 representation instead of just dots. (NUL, space, and 0xFF are all blanks, so I used other Unicode code points for those.) A little bit similar to Base-437 above.
Hey I love the sound of that! Please publish it on GitHub so I can build it in C or whatever. I think it was the blanks in xxd that gave me the idea for how good it would be to just display them - Unicode!
I’ll have to dig it up and put it out there for you. It’s actually already on GitHub but buried in another completely unrelated repo (networking tools where I was looking at undecoded binary dumps of network traffic).
1. Endless scrolling random Code Page 437 text: https://o0101.github.io/random/ (but it seems to be broken indicated by an overabundance of the non-existent "block question mark". Code here in case anyone wants to submit a fix :) : https://github.com/o0101/random)
2. Base-437 - a way to encode any binary file into faithful-to-code-page-437-glyphs that you can nevertheless throw into HTML no problemo: https://browserbox.github.io/Base437/ This means, for instance, you can have a "data:image/png;base437,ëPNG♪◙→◙ ♪IHDR ◘♠ \r¿f ♦gAMA Åⁿa♣ cHRM z& Çä · ÇΦ u..." URI for an image. I just think it looks cool being able to see the content rather than base64 which hides it. Code: https://github.com/BrowserBox/Base437