4 ms·
One of the challenges of | is that it was never entirely clear whether the ASCII | should be equivalent to EBCDIC’s | or ¦. As I recall, Waterloo C wanted ¦ as
by dhosek 4y ago
One of the challenges of | is that it was never entirely clear whether the ASCII | should be equivalent to EBCDIC’s | or ¦. As I recall, Waterloo C wanted ¦ as its vertical bar character, although I could be wrong. On the IBM system that I used back in the 80s, we had ASCII terminals which were run through a muxer to the actual system (which was part of the magic that allowed it to have thousands of concurrent users all getting real-time access—a lot of UI was offloaded to these systems which were essentially minicomputers on their own).
- watersb 4y agoGreat article (that appeared on HN somewhat recently) from Ken Shirrif on the history display terminals, and a great photo of the IBM 2848 Display Controller. http://www.righto.com/2019/11/ibm-sonic-delay-lines-and-history-of.html http://www.righto.com/2019/11/ibm-sonic-delay-lines-and-hist... The next-gen was far more common.. The IBM 3270 terminal hooked to a local controller that talked to the mainframe. Could also hook a printer to the controller, you could print screen and simple forms independently from the mainframe. You know all this, but I've always thought it was cool, and try to refresh my understanding of the setup. I no doubt have many details wrong.