RE: 8 bits preference?

Thanks for the corrections, Doug!
Clive

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Ewell [mailto:doug_at_ewellic.org]
Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 5:00 PM
To: Hohberger, Clive
Cc: unicode_at_unicode.org
Subject: RE: 8 bits preference?

"Hohberger, Clive" <CHohberger at zebra dot com> wrote:

> IBM used 6-bit EBCDIC.

There's no such thing. Maybe "6-bit BCDIC" was meant.

> IBM changed the game with the System/360. IBM introduced 8-bit ASCII in the mid 60's, it having been developed by ANSI x3.2, first published in 1963. It was a superset of 5-bit Baudot and 7-bit ISO 646.See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII Part of the reason was to equally support accented Latin characters used in European languages. Today it is known as ISO 8859/1.

"ASCII" is and always has been a 7-bit standard, which could always be
transported along 8-bit lines. Extensions to ASCII to support
additional characters are no longer "ASCII." There were several such
extensions before DEC MCS came along as the predecessor to ISO 8859-1.
I don't think this was an IBM innovation, and certainly not in the mid
'60s. System/360 was, in fact, a primarily EBCDIC platform.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­
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