Re: lynx-dev EBCDIC events

[David Combs]

On Mon, Feb 22, 1999 at 11:01:26PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> In a recent note, Philip Webb said:
> 
> > Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 00:30:31 -0500 (EST)
> > 
> > golligee: i thought everyone used ASCII except a few old IBM mainframes,
> > whose OS390 now benefitted from your port of Lynx:
> 
> Yup.  Them's the ones.  But not just the old ones.  They're not getting
> any smarter.

Off subject, but back in maybe 1971 when I first looked at the
360, I had been working on the WONDERFUL dec-10, a word-oriented
machine, 36bits per word, into which one could fit "bytes" or
whatever size, 7 for ascii, packed together for however many
words it took.

Anyway, max address space was 256k words, which in those days 
was HUGE; and you could directly address all that via 18big
address-part of 36bit instruction.  Also, indexed and indirect
addressing, of course.

That 360, what a piece of shit, at least pretty much all
dec-10 users thought.  I mean, this base register stuff;
seemingly DESIGNED to make programming almost impossible.

Well, it was ibm, so it was right.

Which I guess why intel did it that way too, or something
like it (never really looked at intel, never wanted to, don't
want to now).

I guess the dec10/dec20 was the last computer one could EASILY
program in assembly language.

I recall that way up into 1984 or so ibm vm/cms still didn't
have a decent (or any?) debugger.  Maybe still don't (for
assy lang; was a while for C get on it?)

On vm/cms, using fortran, you couldn't even open a file 
interactively ("please enter name for input file: ");
had to do all this DD horseshit.  Just the WORST DESIGNED
"system" one could imagine.  All the while they had 
IBM RESEARCH with all these software geniuses who seemingly
did nothing to make it easier to use (except for apl and later
relational databases and whatever-by-example (nifty)).

Not like the guys at bell labs -- man, did they contribute to
the world!

I recall Kernighan giving a talk somewhere once, and he 
repeated their ibm-mantra that "using mvs was like trying
to drag a dead whale down the beach".

Anyway, sorry for the diversion.  I just havent heard much
of ebcdic (sp?) and 360/370/... in years (in my circles).
Just brings up nightmares from long, long ago.  Horrible
memories awakened.

David