Re: Computerworld editorial: ASCII is better than EBCDIC

I don't know the history of ASCII, but I do know that EBCDIC (Extended Binary
Coded Decimal Interchange Code) was developed by IBM in the early 1960's and
announced on the then revolutionary new system, the 360.  It was an outgrowth
of BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) which was a 7 level bit code used by earlier IBM
iron that was made up of 6 bits plus a partity bid.  It was used on the
venerable 1400 and 7000 series processors.  So, I suspect that saying that
EBCDIC is a subset of something else belies its history and pedigree.

Rich Loeber
Kisco Information Systems
http://www.kisco.com
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Carel Teijgeler wrote:

Did not read the article, but I think he is more PC minded than AS/400 (if
he has heard of the system).

By the way, ASCII and EBCDIC are subsets of UNICDE, AFAIK.

Regards,
Carel Teijgeler

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 31-10-2006 at 13:57 Mike Cunningham wrote:

Did anyone else read Frank Hayes column in the Oct 23 issue of
Computerworld where hs states that ASCII is better than EBCDIC. When I
went thru school (I won't say when but it was after the birth of ASCII
in the '60s) we were taught that EBCDIC was better since it was 8-bit
and supported 256 characters and ASCII was 7 (at least at that time) and
only support 128 characters. Any idea why he would say ASCII was better?


p.s. I do agree that both should be retired and replaced by unicode

--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.