I used to have a bulletin board outside of my office which I could use to post interesting tidbits. Interesting to me anyway.
Thursday, November 13, 2003
Unicode and Character Sets
This article gives a very good overview on the topic of character encoding. Recommended reading for any and every programmer. Even if you only work in COBOL and IMS, there is a very good chance that your data will end up on a webpage.
Triva: according to old-timers (you and I are just kids, Terry) the IBM 360 was supposed to be an ASCII machine. The plan changed because IBM's peripheral devices used EBCDIC and ASCII versions would not be available in time for the s/360 launch.
IBM reserved a bit in the PSW to allow switching from ASCII to EBCDIC mode, but it was never accepted by the user community.
I wonder how things would have turned out had s/360 been an ASCII machine.
1 comment:
Triva: according to old-timers (you and I are just kids, Terry) the IBM 360 was supposed to be an ASCII machine. The plan changed because IBM's peripheral devices used EBCDIC and ASCII versions would not be available in time for the s/360 launch.
IBM reserved a bit in the PSW to allow switching from ASCII to EBCDIC mode, but it was never accepted by the user community.
I wonder how things would have turned out had s/360 been an ASCII machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
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