On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 15:52:44 -0500, Tony Harminc wrote: >> > >> >Case sensitivity and null-terminated strings: two historical Unix mistakes >> >that have cost untold billions. >> > >> And EBCDIC tops them both. Just count the problems discussed on these lists. > >I'd say it's an "EBCDIC in an ASCII world" problem; not anything >fundamentally wrong with EBCDIC. Imagine if the original IBM PC had >been an EBCDIC machine. OS/2 and Windows would surely have followed, >Unicode would've been EBCDIC-based, and we'd live in a different but >not necessarily worse world. > Conversely, if the original S/360 had been an ASCII machine, ...
ASCII antedated EBCDIC. EBCDIC was the disastrous outcome of IBM's struggle to meet schedule and cost targets when IBM "bet the future of the company" on the S/360. IBM won; customers lost. ASCII suffered a "jungle of incompatible code pages" similar to that of EBCDIC -- consider the ISO-Latin variants. But ASCII had a practical path to UNICODE because ASCII, unlike EBCDIC, kept important code points static. EBCDIC made the irreparable mistake of overloading common code points rather than colonizing the 256-character wilderness as ASCII did. And IBM missed a more recent opportunity by not making z/OS UNIX System Services ASCII-based like the original IBM PC. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
