On 2017-12-09 08:10 AM, Russell via talk wrote:
Professor: "So the American government went to IBM to come up with an encryption standard, and they came up with—" Student: "EBCDIC!"
In jest, I know, but — unfair! If you start from the punched card for tallying numbers, then EBCDIC makes sense. BCD is a practical method of storing decimal numeric data, especially where financial transactions have to add up perfectly. EBCDIC was just a small alphabetical add-on to IBM's existing numeric tabulators. Many of the compromises/weirdnesses in EBCDIC's collation sequences can be traced back to mechanical limitations of IBM card punches of the 1940s to 1960s. The printing card punches contained a quite lovely device called a code plate that generated the printed dot-matrix letters. It's fully described here: http://www.masswerk.at/misc/card-punch-typography/ Yep, a bitmap font¹ defined in a postage-stamp sized chunk of metal. In 1949. Pretty neat, I have to say. Stewart ¹: Yes, Myles; before you ask, I went there: https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/keypunch029