Tomas Hajny wrote:
On Thu, February 9, 2012 15:08, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
steve smithers wrote:
.
.
"Also, the standard character set on the 360/370/Z-System is EBCDIC,
while the Pentium uses ASCII."
If the community can't get its head around the idea that character
encoding is much more an operating system than a hardware issue, that
the Intel/AMD range of processors could happily run an EBCDIC-based
operating system, and that IBM gleefully supports ASCII-based Linux and
ASCII-based Internet services then it's going to be damn difficult to
get this (sub)project off the ground.
Just a comment on this: While I understand your statement and the Linux
port obviously confirms that an ASCII based operating system is possible
on S370 too, I wouldn't consider the character set being so completely
independent from the underlying hardware (all IBM PC compatible graphic
adapters can show ASCII characters directly but not EBCDIC, and also Intel
CPU instruction set includes support for BCD arithmetics based on the
ASCII character set if I understand it correctly).
I agree: when taking terminals and- in the general case- other I/O
devices into account. But both the examples I gave- one from Wikipaedia
and the other from Wikibooks- specifically associated ASCII with the CPU
type ("Intel" in one case, "Pentium" in the other) and I really don't
think that's healthy.
I was just checking the BCD arithmetic situation a few minutes ago, and
I believe that there's a "half carry" flag for carry out of the first
four bits: and that will work equally well for both ASCII and EBCDIC. I
might have come across other cases, but I can't remember whether they
apply to x86.
I've worked for a pretty unpleasant mainframe outfit, and am very much
used to the way that that type of corporation attempts to rewrite
history to their advantage and forces their position on their employees
and customers. "The company that invented virtual memory and the virtual
machine" to which I added "and the intermittent fault"... didn't last
very long, but they had some interesting kit.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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