On Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:00:00 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: >Because there was no standard 8-bit code at the time. IBM did push for an >8-bit ASCII, > That's not an obstacle. DEC PDP-8 stored ASCII characters one per 12-bit word. IBM could have simply declared the top bit "reserved" as they are so often wont to do.
>but it never happened except for a mapping between octets and punch >combinations on cards. Had Unicode been around at the time they would probably >have jumped at it. > >ISO 8859 was a day late and a dollar short. > ISO-8859-* is afflicted with the same babel as EBCDIC code pages because of the "*" you elided. UTF-8 is the norm nowadays because of a peculiar upward compatibility with ASCII. But the mebibytes and megahertz to support it came a day late. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
