On Tue, 2 Jun 2020 15:14:33 -0400, Tony Harminc wrote:
>
>Some card readers supported Column Binary or Card Image mode, and in
>this case a card record was 160 bytes with each column mapped to the
>low-order 6 bits of two adjacent bytes. I think there were some other
>variations for this mapping.
>
A colleague, steeped in CDC 6400 lore, got a Ph.D. from U. of Colo. and
took a job with IBM. He took his personal source library of utilities on
CDC binary cards, two 6-bit characters per column, intending that his
first learning experience with s/360 assembler would be deciphering
and translating CDC=>EBCDIC.
He could not get access to any IBM reader with the column binary
feature.
>Code Pages as we know them today have their roots a good deal later
>than punched cards. At least in the IBM mainframe world, they came
>from the 3270 devices, which were initially US-centric, with only
>upper case English (unaccented Latin) letters. Almost immediately
>local variants were field developed in many countries to provide
>characters needed. In many - maybe most - cases the character
>assignments clashed, and because of the 3270 addressing architecture,
>positions below X'40' were not available.
>
Don't forget lower case. But I guess IBM did. Alas. See:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513204153/http://www.bobbemer.com/P-BIT.HTM
>A very good historic reference for how this developed is the 1989
>SHARE "ASCII and EBCDIC Character Set and Code Issues in Systems
>Application Architecture" report by the ASCII / EBCDIC Character Set
>Task Force. To make their point, they used the short name "SHARE ÆCS
>Report". I have a scanned copy if you can't find it online somewhere.
>Parts of this became input into the design of UNICODE.
-- gil
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