On Fri, 19 Feb 2016 22:08:44 +0000, Gibney, David Allen,Jr wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] ?> On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin >> Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:02 PM >> >> EBCDIC is a pain. It should have been ASCII. Or IBM should finish >> implementation of Enhanced ASCII support. > >Can you really imagine the level of acceptance (NOT) that would have received >2.5 decades ago :)
MVS OpenEdition, as it was called in MVS/SP 4.3, wasn't especially well received when it was announced almost 2.5 decades ago. Would it have been better received if it had been ASCII? ASCII was seriously considered for the initial System/360 design. Amdahl, Blaauw and Brooks published an article in the IBM Journal in April, 1964, titled "Architecture of the System/360" in which many of the design trade-offs were described. One place where the article can be found is http://web.ece.ucdavis.edu/~vojin/CLASSES/EEC272/S2005/Papers/IBM360-Amdahl_april64.pdf . <quote> ASCII vs BCD codes. The selection of the 8-bit character size in 1961 proved wise by 1963, when the American Standards Association adopted a 7-bit standard character code for information interchange (ASCII). This 7-bit code is now under final consideration by the International Standards Organization for adoption as an international standards recommendation. The question became “Why not adopt ASCII as the only internal code for System/360?’ 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. Nevertheless, a choice had to be made for the code-sensitive I/O devices and for programming support, and the solution was to offer both codes, as a user option. Systems with either option will, of course, easily read or write I/O media with the other code. </quote> -- Tom Marchant ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
