And just to make you laugh/groan/cry, from a book I read last night (fiction), someone commenting on an encoded transmission: "I'm pretty sure it's eight-bit ASCII, also known as UTF-8"
-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Tony Harminc Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2024 11:26 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: EBCDIC/ASCII - FTP On Tue, 28 May 2024 at 09:44, Paul Gilmartin < 0000042bfe9c879d-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote: > [...] > Should I Imagine that originally EBCDIC had no btackets and two > customer cultures improvised, independently? > I'm not sure to what extent it was customer cultures vs the infamous multiple ways of doing things within IBM. I'd say the two sets of roots are the TN print train (for the 1403), and the 3270 character set with its early limitations on available character generator memory. Different kinds of customers had different requirements for characters even within the US market, and of course Europe had a whole 'nother requirement for accented characters. And we mustn't forget that this is all the Data Processing Division (DPD), and in parallel there was the Office Products Division doing its own thing. Increasing the number of characters on a print train slows it down, while the 3270 has an architected and large set of control characters that eat into the available display character space even if there is enough memory in the terminal. Solutions to these two issues developed in different and incompatible directions. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
