[Info-vax] VMS-based InfoServer

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

On 2010-08-06 03:20, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert schrieb:
>
>> 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.
>
> Sure, but this is just like swapping bytes when confronted with
> binary data from a machine with different byte order,
> that is, the format of the foreign data has to be known.
> z/OS (MVS) native encoding is EBCDIC.
> When I last used MVS, it could read AL tapes,
> but had difficulties to write them.
>
>> I thought that EBCDIC would have gone out with 80 column punched cards!
>
> And what about the megatons of EBCDIC data already stored on disk
> and tape until then?
>
>> Do they still use punched cards? It's been about ten years since I last
>> saw one!
>
> In a museum perhaps. Punched cards disappeared about 30 years ago.
> I still use some, as bookmarks (in real books).
>

Yes, but the batch processing in MVS still *thinks* it reads
from 80 pos cards and write to 132 pos lineprinters :-)
Everything else are emulating cardreaders and lineprinters.

When you SUBMIT a JCL batch jobb from the editor in SPF, it is
sent to the "internal reader", a software emulation of the card
reader interface. Or you can use FTP to set our output file
to INTRDR (or similar) to FTP JCL streams directly to the
batch subsystem.