Re: evolution of bytes, The joy of FORTRAN

On Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:43:15 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

The contemporaneous B3500 was both digit and character addressable,
with characters on even address boundaries.   Like the 360, it had an
ASCII flag in the processor that controlled the value of the zone digit
during arithmetic operations on bytes.  Like the 360, nobody used it
and it was removed a couple generations later.
 
 

The flag was totally useless, especially since that’s all it did. All
the software and peripherals used EBCDIC.

The ICL 2900 had such a flag. ICL always used EBCDIC, but I was involved
in an alternate operating system that used ASCII. It changed the way BCD
instructions worked, etc.



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