Anyone remember the IBM mainframe (7090 series) in 8 bit octal mode? OK, I'm
dating myself.
George Fogg
-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Tom Schmidt
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 8:04 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: System 360 EBCDIC vs. ASCII (was Re: High order bit in 31/24 bit
address)
On Tue, 6 Nov 2007 17:29:10 -0800, Edward Jaffe wrote:
I would also add that -- with 21st century hindsight and certainly not
a design mistake per se -- it sure would have been lucky if they had
standardized on ASCII instead of EBCDIC!
I think that the 360 lineage would have been less likely to have survived to
the 21st century if IBM would have standardized on ASCII back then. The
predictions of the mainframe's demise by the early to mid 1990s might have
come true if the corporate/legacy data had not been held prisoner by EBCDIC.
EBCDIC bought IBM time to rethink the role of the mainframe.
--
Tom Schmidt
Madison, WI
(Think of all the processing cycles that were sold by all competing camps
performing the code page transformations.)
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