In 1964 the GOST

GOST

GOST refers to a set of technical standards maintained by the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification , a regional standards organization operating under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States .All sorts of regulated standards are included, with examples...

 standards body of the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 defined the standard for encoding data. This standard allowed a variable character size - depending on the type of data being encoded.

GOST 10859 only allowed uppercase characters. Subsequent Soviet standards included lowercase:

1. GOST 19768/74
2. GOST 19768/87
3. GOST 13052

These include the non-ASCII "⏨" (Decimal Exponent Symbol U+23E8). It was used to express real numbers in Scientific notation. For example: 6.0221415⏨23.

The "⏨" character was also part of the ALGOL

ALGOL

ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...

 programming language specifications, and was also incorporated into the then German character encoding standard ALCOR

ALCOR

ALCOR is an early computer language definition created by the ALCOR Group, a consortium of universitites, research institutions and manufacturers in Europe and the USA which was founded in 1959 and which had 60 members in 1966. The group had the aim of a common compiler specification for a subset...

. GOST 10859 also included numerous other non-ASCII characters/symbols useful to ALGOL programmers, e.g.: ∨, ∧, ⊃, ≡, ¬, ≠, ↑, ↓, ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ° & ∅. c.f. ALGOL operatorshttp://www.masswerk.at/algol60/report.htm.

The "␡" character served the same function as the "␡" in 7-bit ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

.

4-bit code: Binary coded decimal

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5-bit code: with BCD & mathematical operators

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6-bit code: with only Cyrillic upper case letters

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7-bit code: Cyrillic & Latin upper case letters

Cyrillic and Latin letters with identical (A, B, C, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, X) and similar (Y/У) glyphs were unified.
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6-bit code: with only Latin upper case letters

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