I think the answer to this question "If IBM had "inflicted" ASCII
on its customers in 1964, would the System/360 have had the wide
acceptance that it did?" was the WANG VS series machines. Just
from my personal experience, many banks were using them, and IBM
was, to some degree, targeting them with MP2000 & 3000 boxes.
Again from my experience in programming with the Wang VS systems,
they appeared to me to be a S/360 with DAT. I think this may have
been because Dr. Wang waited until the patents expired for the
S/370 features. I was involved in migrating several of those
systems into an MVS/JES3 environment (mid-1980s time frame) used
by a major bank that was buying up small banks that were using
WANG VS machines. I had to convert their banking software data to
match Florida Software (for banks) [not to be confused with the
State of Florida]. Steve Thompson
On 5/8/2024 11:36 AM, Tom Marchant wrote:
I have seen this before, and I am not persuaded. I find it interesting
that all of the references provided were written by Mr. Beemer himself,
some of them with another author.
Perhaps, in hindsight it would have been better if IBM had made the
System/360 an ASCII only machine. But at the time, ASCII was new and
relatively unknown. As it was, the market had generally rejected ASCII
on System/360, so the USASCII bit was removed with the introduction of
System/370 in 1970.
Both ASCII and EBCDIC are limited. ASCII, even more so because it is a
7 bit code, though there are proprietary 8 bit extensions. No one knew
in 1964 that Unicode would later be designed based upon ASCII.
The claim that "A 1-to-1 translation between the two [ASCII and EBCDIC]
exists" is false.Each includes characters that are not defined in the
other. This has always been the case.
If IBM had "inflicted" ASCII on its customers in 1964, would the
System/360 have had the wide acceptance that it did? We will never know.
According to "Architecture of System/360"
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/8/175/files/2015/08/IBM-360.pdf
<quote>
The reasons against such exclusive adoption was the
widespread use of the BCD code derived from and easily
translated to the IBM card code. To facilitate use of both
codes, the central processing units are designed with a
high degree of code independence, with generalized code
translation facilities, and with program-selectable BCD or
ASCII modes for code-dependent instructions. Neverthe-
less, a choice had to be made for the code-sensitive I/O
devices and for the programming support, and the solution
was to offer both codes, fully supported, as a user option.
Systems with either option will, of course, easily read or
write I/O media with the other code.
</quote>
Aside from that, it wasn't the "P-bit", but the A bit.
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