Re: So much for THAT excuse | Computerworld SHARK TANK

[Steve Thompson]

Two things. Not all mainframes were EBCDIC based. Some were field data based 
yet handled the translation to/from ASCII and to/from EBCDIC. Burroughs used 
EBCDIC but sign bits were on the opposite end of a word as I recall. 

S/360 machines I worked on had a switch in the PSW to set them in ASCII mode. I 
don’t remember or know of any software that made use of this. So that bit was 
eventually required to be ON to force DAT or XA. I have forgotten what that bit 
was “stolen” for now. 

Just some more architecture history. 

Sent from my iPhone — small keyboarf, fat fungrs, stupd spell manglr. Expct 
mistaks 


> On Nov 19, 2018, at 4:11 PM, Pew, Curtis G <curtis....@austin.utexas.edu> 
> wrote:
> 
>> On Nov 19, 2018, at 2:52 PM, Tony Harminc <t...@harminc.net> wrote:
>> 
>> I'd say it's an "EBCDIC in an ASCII world" problem; not anything
>> fundamentally wrong with EBCDIC. Imagine if the original IBM PC had
>> been an EBCDIC machine. OS/2 and Windows would surely have followed,
>> Unicode would've been EBCDIC-based, and we'd live in a different but
>> not necessarily worse world.
>> 
> 
> What’s “fundamentally wrong” with EBCDIC is it’s non-standard. Sure, 
> as far as just one set of mappings of codes to characters there’s nothing 
> inherently superior about ASCII, but being a standard across different 
> vendors and operating systems makes ASCII superior.
> 
> By the time the IBM PC came along, everybody outside the mainframe world had 
> standardized on ASCII; if it had used EBCDIC it probably wouldn’t have had 
> as much uptake.
> 
> The truly sad thing is that Bob Bemer was working for IBM and had convinced 
> upper management of the importance of ASCII during the development of 
> System/360, but this understanding wasn’t communicated to the engineers, 
> programmers, and (notably) customers who needed to implement it. As a result, 
> those of us who work with z/OS, z/VM, and z/VSE are burdened by character 
> encoding issues that don’t face people on other systems/OS’s.
> 
> I just spent an hour this very morning explaining to a developer why a 
> EBCDIC->ASCII process wasn’t translating square brackets and a few other 
> special characters the way he expected. If the System/360 community had 
> embraced ASCII, as IBM’s management had intended, I could have spent that 
> time doing something useful.
> 
> -- 
> Pew, Curtis G
> curtis....@austin.utexas.edu
> ITS Systems/Core/Administrative Services
> 
> 
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