On 06/28/2020 05:28 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
Since punchcards I think had a 16 bit encoding, lack of
byte data
was not big problem. Who used paper tape on a 360?
IBM punch cards had 12 rows of holes. For alpha encoding,
logic in the controller
converted that to EBCDIC or your machine's favorite internal
character interpretation.
On the IBM 360, there was a straight binary encoding using
only 8 bits for the data (80 bytes/card) or using all 12
bits of two character positions to encode 3 bytes. that
way, you got 120 bytes/card.
I don't know any way to get 16-bit encoding on punch cards
of that format. Maybe some other manufacturer's punch card
format.
We had paper tape read and punch on a 360/50 at University
or Missouri at Rolla. It was used for compatibility with
the Data General minicomputers there. Only place I've ever
seen paper tape on a 360.
Jon
