14 Dec
2010
14 Dec
'10
10:44 a.m.
From: Brent Hilpert
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 10:13 AM
On 2010 Dec 14, at 9:21 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 14 Dec 2010 at 0:27, Brent Hilpert wrote:
>>> Noper, they just moved to Canada. ;-) (I
dunno if it's really true,
>>> but I remember printing out a page of light bulb jokes from an
>>> individual that worked for EDS Canada (Oshawa, IIRC) (on the IBM
>>> 3090 mainframes) and found it odd that the oh's were slashed and the
>>> zeros were not...
>> Nothing to do with Canada to my experience,
more likely an IBMism.
> Not that. My 1960s IBM manuals (mostly S/360) all
show coding form
> samples with slashed zeroes.
OK, .. still not a Canadianism, though. Would seem
like a strange
site-specific mod.
Looking at some old docs, it appears it wasn't
consistent even within
IBM: an early 60's IBM brochure shows an EBCDIC table in which the
character zero has a slash, in the same table the zeroes in the punch
codes do not have a slash. A 360/370 assembler textbook (Struble/U of
Oregon) has assembler listings with the Ohs slashed and the zeroes
plain.
Are there no IBMers out there that remember whether
the dot was in the
middle of the Oh or the Zero in 3270/3278 terminals?
I first learned to program on an IBM 1401 and a System/360 (running DOS)
in 1969, and only worked in IBM-oriented computer labs in college and grad
school until I met the DEC-20 in 1977; I continued to be bicomputeral until
the Stanford job in 1984. I think that qualifies me as a kind of IMBer.
I was taught, as were my various colleagues in the IBM world, to slash my
alpha O characters, since alphabetic text was uncommon in data processing
and we'd get tired of slashing all those numeric zeroes.
One person's experience.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/