[rescue] Re: [SunRescue] OT: AS/400 stuff

[Ken Hansen]

It has it's own beauty - all the numbers are (in hex) F0 = "0",
F1="1"...F9="9" - numeric fields can be packed, but I think I drank away the
brain cells that remembered the exact scheme.

A neat trick used back in the late 70's was to program an EEPROM with all
the 256 addresses representing every possible EBCDIC charater, and storing
in the address the value of the ASCII equivalent - a one-piece ASCII <->
EBCDIC conversion...

Another popular conversion was to turn Selectric typewriters in to
printers...

Ah, the good old days...

Ken
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 6:56 PM
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] OT: AS/400 stuff


> On June 5, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > There once was a time whrn the Government decreed that all the computers
> > they buy will be ASCII-based, and IBM had the might to say "no, we think
> > EBCIDC (sp?) is better" and won, the government kept buying IBM
mainframes
> > that were not ASCII compliant.
>
>   EBCDIC...Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code.
>
>   Truly strange compared to ASCII.
>
>      -Dave McGuire
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