On Nov 19, 2018, at 4:26 PM, Steve Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: > > S/360 machines I worked on had a switch in the PSW to set them in ASCII mode. > I don’t remember or know of any software that made use of this. So that bit > was eventually required to be ON to force DAT or XA. I have forgotten what > that bit was “stolen” for now. >
Right. The expectation was that routines would check the bit and generate output in the appropriate codeset, and eventually everyone would be using ASCII. Instead, everyone ignored the bit and generated EBCDIC, so the bit was reused for something else (I can’t remember what either.) -- Pew, Curtis G [email protected] ITS Systems/Core/Administrative Services ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
