[Info-vax] AlphaVM-free emulator with all additional peripheral components

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:22:52 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:

> In article <bddoe9-amg1.ln1 at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture
> <paul at sture.ch> writes:
>> 
>> A seasoned IBMer could probably spot EBCDIC a mile off though.
> 
>    Which is why I decided against it.  At the time EBCDIC based systems
>    from IBM were still fairly common.
> 
>    Does IBM even still use EBCDIC on thier "mainframes"?  I've got a
>    green card somewhere, but I haven't used any of thier systems is
>    years.
> 
>    I still recall the first IBM system we got that worked in ASCII:  a
>    desktop word processor that shipped a couple of years before the
>    first PC.  But I'm not sure when IBM actually started using ASCII.

According to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC#History

IBM were on the ASCII committee but adopted EBCDIC but didn't have time 
to convert their peripherals before shipping so stayed with EBCDIC.

"... but AIX running on the iSeries, Linux running on the zSeries, and 
the IBM PC and its descendants use ASCII."

"The collating sequence of lower case alphabetic characters is higher 
than upper case and numerics are higher still — the exact opposite of 
ASCII."

The collating sequence got me at one stage.  I was wondering if we had 
enough disk space to sort a very large input file into ASCII sequence, 
then it occurred to me to do two passes up the file outputting the 
numerics first.

-- 
Paul Sture