[GTALUG] IBM Mainframe and z/OS

[Russell]

On December 9, 2017 9:02:03 AM EST, "Stewart C. Russell via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>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/

Very interesting link. Also nice to know how little endian transport "return zero" errors we're being handled back in the day.

"Moreover, the letter “O” and the number zero, which, while being produced by destinctive encodings, shared the same form on the 026, were altered for visual distinction."

Most recently, after trying several kernel taints on my Intel gpu, which is having font rendering issues, I dumped my DSDT table and found namespace/pstate conflicts in returning zero as serialized data. Seven errors and a couple of hundred warnings. I tried Rawhide for better gpu drivers but no joy there.

Steve was certainly right about one aspect of a corporate learning initiative. They will most likely have up to date accurate documentation and the best human mentorship they can afford.

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

Me too. Eighty years later, pinpoint engineering and manufacturing accuracy has put billions of Gladys Hoppers ideas on that same sized chunk. Well not just Gladys, but all the engineers and mathematicians who's work made this stuff affordable for me to hack around with.  

I think reading about the history of the engineering is half the fun. From my perspective that's the best part of the Internet. The other half is putting that knowledge to current use in a practical way. 

I bought an Nvidia card and untainted my kernels DRM. I'm going to dump DSDT again and I'll have more fun with serialized data. All the time I'll be  swearing at systemd granularity requirements while secretly knowing I will have to figure it all out.

With everyone else's help of course. :-)

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