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From: Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: evolution of bytes, The joy of FORTRAN
Date: 1 Mar 2025 21:28:46 GMT
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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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