I doubt that IBM custumers would have been happy with an 8-bit code page with only 128 valid code points. International considerations would still have forced IBM to device incompatible code pages for different countries.
Obviously 8859 is another Tower of Babel; why do you think I described it as "a dollar short"? No,, IBM could not have implemented full Unicode, or even the full MLP, back in the 1960s. But it could certainly have implemented a basic subset for all customers and selected additional pages for international customers. Had Unicode and UTF-8 been around at the time, I'm certain that IBM would have gone that route. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2020 6:22 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Improve OMVS cp performance? On Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:00:00 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: >Because there was no standard 8-bit code at the time. IBM did push for an >8-bit ASCII, > That's not an obstacle. DEC PDP-8 stored ASCII characters one per 12-bit word. IBM could have simply declared the top bit "reserved" as they are so often wont to do. >but it never happened except for a mapping between octets and punch >combinations on cards. Had Unicode been around at the time they would probably >have jumped at it. > >ISO 8859 was a day late and a dollar short. > ISO-8859-* is afflicted with the same babel as EBCDIC code pages because of the "*" you elided. UTF-8 is the norm nowadays because of a peculiar upward compatibility with ASCII. But the mebibytes and megahertz to support it came a day late. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
