072 101 108 108 111 032 087 111 114 108 100... with Optional 032 or 046.

There seems to be no other Thread (upon NAS) discussing this as a Topic, or Hobby, or its fancies... despite everyone who can read this actually doing it or using it. 

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  • Well, got fascinated by some exchanges on another thread, where some other users were posting strings of seemingly meaningless numbers back and forth.

    Some folk were asking "what on earth are all these numbers about", so I tried to help by explaining a bit.

    In the reply you just wrote, you typed:

    It would be good to understand it

    It turns out that the computer system you wrote that on didn't produce those letters in the same way an old typewriter would.

    Instead, each time you hit a key, the computer sensed a number, and remembered it somewhere. Then, it turned those numbers back into little pictures that happen to look (to you) like letters, numbers, punctuation marks and so on.

    When you pushed the "Reply" button to add your words to the forum, your computer sent the numbers representing the things you typed to the big computer systems that provide this forum.

    Example:

    It would be good to understand it

    could be sent as:

    073 116 032 119 111 117 108 100 032 098 101 032 103 111 111 100 032 116 111 032 117 110 100 101 114 115 116 097 110 100 032 105 116

    that is to say:

    "It" corresponds to the numbers seventy-three, and one hundred and sixteen. Each of the remaining letters in your words above similarly correspond to the remaining numbers.

    If you look at the last word in what I quoted from you, it is another "it". The final letter 't' is again coded as the number one hundred and sixteen.

    Does that help?

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