The System/3 used 96-column cards that were physically smaller than
Hollerith cards.

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353
Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 7:43 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Punched cards and character set

Radoslaw,

In the IBM world, all possible EBCDIC characters (all 256) were possible to
punch into physical cards, but punching any characters not on the keypunch
machine's keyboard (like lower-case letters) required using the
"multi-punch" key (or on older keypunch machines, physically holding the
card in place so that punches did not advance the column position) to
manually punch the necessary holes in one column.

If you sent "object deck" output of the assembler or a compiler to a
physical card punch peripheral you could punch all 256 characters into them.
It was harder to do from a manual keypunch machine.

There were alternate physical card formats for non-IBM environments.  IIRC,
Univac used a 96-column card with round holes instead of rectangular ones.
I saw them once, but never got to work with them.

I have been asking Google to find any documentation of the full encoding of
punches to EBCDIC characters but haven't found anything relevant yet.

Sorry, I don't have any actual JCL on physical punched cards any more.
Somewhere in the attic I may have a box or two of blank ones, but nothing
with punches.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of
R.S.
Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 10:20 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Punched cards and character set

I have never used punched cards, so forgive me my questions.

As far as I know, a character set on punched cards was somehow limited, so
it is not EBCDIC or similar set of 256 characters.
Of course that means some limitations for DD * datasets - if coded on real
punched cards.
Nowadays I'm pretty sure DD * accept every possible character, as any other
dataset (with some exception for delimiter). Note, it is program independent
- this is a change within system (JES2, Interpreter, whatever).

Q1: how it was in the past? I mean, were the DD * limited to "punched card"
character set? Or it was always full EBCDIC if the job was read from DASD?

Q2: What about character set on the cards? Was it always one and the same
within S/360 family? I noted there were several character sets, but as far
as I understand those set was for other machines (Remington,
pre-S360 IBM machines, etc.)
Was there any name for card character set? I mean something like "CP 037" or
so.


And another question, or rather kind request: Does anynone have JCL
statements on punched cards? I would like to get/download some images of
JOB, EXEC, and DD statements on punched cards. I have a lot of card
pictures, but none with JCL.

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