Ebcdic, Ebcdic

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However, IBM did not have time to prepare ASCII peripherals (such as card punch machines) to ship with its System/360 computers, so the company settled on EBCDIC at the time. The System/360 became wildly successful, and thus so did EBCDIC.

Since punch cards are no longer used on mainframes, EBCDIC is used in modern mainframes solely for backwards compatibility. It has no real technical advantage over ASCII-based code pages such as the ISO-8859 series or Unicode. There are some technical niceties in each, e.g., ASCII and EBCDIC both have one bit which indicates upper or lower case. But there are some aspects of EBCDIC which make it much less pleasant to work with than ASCII (such as a non-contiguous alphabet).

Generally this is done with some form of Unicode support. There is an EBCDIC Unicode Transformation Format called UTF-EBCDIC proposed by the Unicode consortium, but it is not intended to be used in open interchange environments and, even on EBCDIC-based systems, it is almost never used. IBM mainframes support UTF-16, but they do not support UTF-EBCDIC natively.

Characters 003F and FF are control, 40 is space, 41 is no-break space ( RSP : "Required Space"), E1 is numeric space ( NSP : "Numeric Space"), and CA is soft hyphen. Characters are shown with their equivalent Unicode codes. Invariant alphanumeric, punctuation, and control characters common to all EBCDIC code pages are shown in color. Unassigned codes are typically filled with international or region-specific characters in the various EBCDIC code page variants.

Source: Wikipedia > Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code