[Info-vax] VMS-based InfoServer

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> On 2010-08-05 21:34, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>> MetaEd wrote:
>>> On Aug 5, 2:41 am, hel... at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
>>> undress to reply) wrote:
>>>> "=" is a poor choice of escape. Some rarer character, such as
>>>> "\" (used by TeX, for this reason) would have been better.
>>>
>>> Yes, and was considered. But backslash would not reliably pass through
>>> EBCDIC gateways, which (believe it or not) was a major headache at the
>>> time. The author of the quoted-printable spec wrote that the following
>>> characters could not be counted on to get through: !"#$@[\]^`{|}~
>>
>> Does *anyone* still use EBCDIC?
> 
> Well, a large deal of international banking, flight reservations
> and other large company OLTP processing does. Never heard about
> "mainframes" or a company called IBM ? Google them ! :-)

Of course I have.  I haven't seen or used one since I left Princeton 
University in 1994.  My last employer had one at a different site that I 
never saw or used.

The parts of the world that I actually see, and/or use, have used ASCII 
for many years now.  ISTR that big iron could handle ASCII; e.g. read 
ANSI labeled tapes and translate ASCII to EBCDIC and vice versa.

I thought that EBCDIC would have gone out with 80 column punched cards!
Do they still use punched cards?  It's been about ten years since I last 
saw one!