On: raising the semantic level of a program

[Jon Elson]

On 06/28/2020 05:28 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
>
> Since punchcards I think had a 16 bit encoding, lack of 
> byte data
> was not big problem. Who used paper tape on a 360?
IBM punch cards had 12 rows of holes.  For alpha encoding, 
logic in the controller
converted that to EBCDIC or your machine's favorite internal 
character interpretation.

On the IBM 360, there was a straight binary encoding using 
only 8 bits for the data (80 bytes/card) or using all 12 
bits of two character positions to encode 3 bytes.  that 
way, you got 120 bytes/card.

I don't know any way to get 16-bit encoding on punch cards 
of that format.  Maybe some other manufacturer's punch card 
format.

We had paper tape read and punch on a 360/50 at University 
or Missouri at Rolla.  It was used for compatibility with 
the Data General minicomputers there.  Only place I've ever 
seen paper tape on a 360.

Jon