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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Thu, 2 May 2024 01:36:56 -0000 (UTC)
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On Wed, 1 May 2024 20:53:06 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

> According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>
>>Both ASCII and the System/360 came out in 1964. IBM’s excuse for
>>inventing its own EBCDIC encoding was that ASCII wasn’t ready in time.
> 
> If you'd read the paper on the Architecture of System/360, you'd know
> that is just plain wrong. See the link I posted earlier today.

See also these links:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_architecture> note 4:

    Because the design of the S/360 occurred simultaneously with the
    development of ASCII, IBM's ASCII support did not match the
    standard that was ultimately adopted.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12360749>:

    This was roughly the same time the ANSI committee was trying to
    standardize ASCII. IBM was a proponent of ASCII, but they had
    shipping deadlines, and kept with their own character set rather
    than delay while they created ASCII peripherals.

This item
<https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/15516/when-did-ibm-start-to-use-ascii>
claims IBM was “a major proponent for ASCII”, but only it seems for
communicating with other systems, not internally within its own
products.

Odd, don’t you think. But consistent with the time-factor excuse.