I haven't seen this mentioned. The punch card codes for letters went like this:
A - I rows 1 - 9
J - R rows 1 - 9
S - Z rows 2 - 9
So why was S assigned to row 2 instead of row 1? The answer I was taught was
that row 1 was too close to an adjacent location. The punching/reading devices
and card stock of the day could not reliably handle punches that close
together, so row 1 was skipped for the third alphabetic sequence.
What's amusing is that this pattern was carried over to EBCDIC. The code for S
likewise skips a possible combination: D9 to E2; 'E1' is not assigned to an
alphabetic character.
.
.
J.O.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
323-715-0595 Mobile
626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW
robin...@sce.com
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of
Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 12:43 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: (External):Re: Punched cards and character set
CAUTION EXTERNAL EMAIL
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
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
