2 ms·

This was roughly the same time the ANSI committee was trying to standardize ASCII. IBM was a proponent of ASCII, but they had shipping deadlines, and kept with

This was roughly the same time the ANSI committee was trying to standardize ASCII. IBM was a proponent of ASCII, but they had shipping deadlines, and kept with their own character set rather than delay while they created ASCII peripherals. The 360 became popular and a lot of code was written for it which assumed the EBCDIC character set (or was it still BCDIC?) was being used, so future mainframes stayed EBCDIC to grandfather in all the code. That shipping deadline and the insane fallout from it has done more to keep me employed in my career than anything else.

alblue 10y ago
I gave a presentation earlier this month on the history of Unicode, where I traced its evolution from ASCII (and showed EBCDIC as well). The deck is up and the video should be around in the near future. http://docklandsljc.uk/2016/06/unicode-cuddly-application-server.html http://docklandsljc.uk/2016/06/unicode-cuddly-application-se... The BCD part is "binary coded decimal" - a way of representing numbers as decimal coded digits, so 0001 1000 meant "18". The BCD Interchange code was a 6 but character set that allowed the standard encoding of uppercase letters and numbers. It was realised onto punched cards by utilising "digits" 11 and 12. The extended binary decimal interchange code was a larger space (8-bit) that allowed the encoding of both uppercase and lower case letters. Incidentally, the terms "upper case" and "lower case" come from printing presses where the individual letter punches (think the head of a typewriter) were stored in "cases" - actually a wooden storage drawer with lots of small rectangular components containing many of each letter; more for E and other vowels, less for Z and X - and since typesetting text involves more lower case than upper case (as per this post) the lower case letters were stored in the lower case so that they would be easier to reach, with the capitals being stored above and sightly further away.

alblue 10y ago

I gave a presentation earlier this month on the history of Unicode, where I traced its evolution from ASCII (and showed EBCDIC as well). The deck is up and the video should be around in the near future. http://docklandsljc.uk/2016/06/unicode-cuddly-application-server.html http://docklandsljc.uk/2016/06/unicode-cuddly-application-se... The BCD part is "binary coded decimal" - a way of representing numbers as decimal coded digits, so 0001 1000 meant "18". The BCD Interchange code was a 6 but character set that allowed the standard encoding of uppercase letters and numbers. It was realised onto punched cards by utilising "digits" 11 and 12. The extended binary decimal interchange code was a larger space (8-bit) that allowed the encoding of both uppercase and lower case letters. Incidentally, the terms "upper case" and "lower case" come from printing presses where the individual letter punches (think the head of a typewriter) were stored in "cases" - actually a wooden storage drawer with lots of small rectangular components containing many of each letter; more for E and other vowels, less for Z and X - and since typesetting text involves more lower case than upper case (as per this post) the lower case letters were stored in the lower case so that they would be easier to reach, with the capitals being stored above and sightly further away.