[GTALUG] IBM Mainframe and z/OS

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2017-12-09 08:10 AM, Russell via talk wrote:
> 
> Professor: "So the American government went to IBM to come up with an encryption standard, and they came up with—"
> Student: "EBCDIC!"

In jest, I know, but — unfair!

If you start from the punched card for tallying numbers, then EBCDIC
makes sense. BCD is a practical method of storing decimal numeric data,
especially where financial transactions have to add up perfectly. EBCDIC
was just a small alphabetical add-on to IBM's existing numeric tabulators.

Many of the compromises/weirdnesses in EBCDIC's collation sequences can
be traced back to mechanical limitations of IBM card punches of the
1940s to 1960s. The printing card punches contained a quite lovely
device called a code plate that generated the printed dot-matrix
letters. It's fully described here:

 http://www.masswerk.at/misc/card-punch-typography/

Yep, a bitmap font¹ defined in a postage-stamp sized chunk of metal. In
1949. Pretty neat, I have to say.

 Stewart

¹: Yes, Myles; before you ask, I went there:
   https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/keypunch029