It controlled the generation, checking and use of zones in packed decimal data. Basically it affected only UNPK and decimal arithmetic.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Tom Brennan <t...@tombrennansoftware.com> Sent: Monday, February 10, 2020 5:17 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: UTF16 to EBCDIC 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. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
