I heard about that bit in college. Do you know what it was supposed to
do internally?
On 2/10/2020 1:50 PM, Pew, Curtis G wrote:
On Feb 10, 2020, at 3:01 PM, Mike Schwab <mike.a.sch...@gmail.com> wrote:
ASCII wasn't finalized when the S/360 was announced. And it needed to
use existing 7 bit peripherals, tapes, etc.
But System/360 was supposed to be an ASCII machine, or at least to transition
to ASCII long term. There was a bit in the PSW to determine if ASCII was in use
or not. The IBM engineers, programmers, lower-level managers, and *customers*
didn’t understand the importance of it, though, so it never happened. In
System/360 the ASCII bit was repurposed to switch between EC mode (needed for
DAT) and BC mode.
Today those of us who use z/OS, etc. are paying the price for that lack of
vision.
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