IBM designed EBCDIC to work with existing card punch equipment and 7 track tapes. ASCII had not been finalized. They included a mode switch into S360 but didn't implement it in software.
On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 5:26 PM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 19:25:54 +0000, Lester, Bob wrote: >> >>I agree with both you and Gil. But, how many programmers in the 60s, 70s, >>even 80s were thinking about Y2K? Sure, the really good ones were, but what >>about the other 80%? >> >>....and, Y2K came off without a hitch...(FSVO - "hitch") 😊 > > >>-----Original Message----- >>From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List Porowski, Kenneth >>Sent: Friday, April 20, 2018 1:20 PM >> >>That was due to lack of foresight by the programmer not due to the age of the >>system. >> > True in the sense that it affected one-year-old computers as much as older > computers > running th same software. > > I'm disappointed that this thread has so much focused on Y2K which I meant > only as > an extreme example. Things change. Y2K was only more precisely forseeable. > > Increasing complexity of the tax code requires new logic. Inflation and rate > escalation > may have made some data fields inadequate in size. E-filing requires network > interfaces > and code to support them and causes the one-day spike in workload. I gather > from > these fora that COBOL is not comfortably suited to TCP/IP. IBM bet that > SNA/VTAM > could crush TCP/IP and customers were the losers. IBM bet that EBCDIC could > crush > ASCII and customers were the losers. And customers bet that COBOL skills > would remain > in the forefront of availability. > > -- gil > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN -- Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
