On Sat, 07 Mar 2020 21:12:15 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Mar 2020 20:51:39 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
>  declaimed the following:
>
>
>>There was almost no commonality between the 2900 and the S/360 S/370
>>apart from the decidedly odd decision to use EDCDIC character codes.
>>
>>
>  EBCDIC had the advantage of mapping practically 1:1 with
Hollerith card
> codes. EBCDIC and ASCII were both released with a year of each other,
> and since IBM already had equipment using "BCDIC" (no "extended") it
> likely was faster for them to develop and release EBCDIC than to wait
> for the ASCII standard, and only then develop systems using it.

Yes, I know about its relationship to cards.

What I dislike about it is the way the A-Z block is broken by groups of
punctuation and other characters which can play merry hell with sorting
as well as putting digits after letters. I knew 6-bit ISO code (used by
ICL 1900s) and ASCII before I met EBCDIC, so I found its collation
sequence rather nasty - and still do.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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