26 Dec
2012
26 Dec
'12
11:10 a.m.
On Dec 26, 2012, at 10:56 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
On 12/26/12 10:36 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
This is coming from the deep dark past (since the DW was a contemporary of System/23) but
I suspect that everything was EBCDIC as it was in
System/23. The character generator ROM in the display was EBCDIC.
Having been there at the time (IBM Boca Raton, FL) there's some history that folks may
not be generally aware of.
System/23 was very important to computing history in more ways than one. Many of the
peripherals used in the original IBM PC were only
slightly changed versions of the peripherals used in System/23. Some of that was due to
the skunkworks nature of the IBM PC in it's very
early days (internal to IBM) and the fact that all of the original HW engineers for the PC
were from System/23. The peripherals were just
re-laid out versions of the System/23 boards. This was done to prevent the
"cheaper" PC boards from being used in System/23. It also
explains a lot about the design choices for what would become the PC (ISA) bus.
TTFN - Guy
There was CP/M-86 offered for the DW, but
I've never run into a copy. Does it use EBCDIC internally, or does it convert from
ASCII to EBCDIC for I/O?
There was also UCSD Pascal, from looking at the press from the time. I would guess they
do EBCDIC translation when talking to printers, etc.
The display logic looks like it could be similar to the PC MDA.