11 Jan
1999
11 Jan
'99
12:57 p.m.
"Hans Franke" <Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de> wrote:
Nop - or better partly correct - it is true that not
every punch
combination was legel (that would be 4096 possible) but at least
there was a legal combination for any possible 8-Bit combination.
Otherways I would have been impossible to boot from a punch card
reader !
Still wrong.
Not all machines that had card readers could boot from cards, and even
the ones that could do so didn't necessarily have a 256-character set
(or 8-bit bytes).
For instance, the IBM 1401, which typically was booted from cards, but
had only 64 distinct characters.