The "ASCII support" was pretty minimal - affected only the sign nibble on packed data, AFAIR.
OTOH, there is little or nothing "EBCDIC" about the hardware - only the OS and most applications. The 360, 370, 390, and z all CAN handle ASCII. MVC and CLC work equally well on EBCDIC, ASCII, and any other 8-bit code you can think of. Linux is ASCII-based and it runs like a champ on 390 or z hardware. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert A. Rosenberg Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2006 2:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Why is JCL allergic to lower case? At 07:19 -0600 on 08/05/2006, Steve Comstock wrote about Re: Why is JCL allergic to lower case?: >... Or that the mainframe would handle ASCII ... Originally the 360 Series COULD handle ASCII - There was a bit in the PSW that flipped it from an EBCDIC to an ASCII machine. That bit later got made reserved and subsequently got repurposed with a new meaning. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
