On: raising the semantic level of a program

[ben]

On 6/28/2020 5:18 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
> 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.

Bad choice of words. I looked at a IBM 1130 only for a short time and
all mostly remember you needed to convert data for every I/O device.

> 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
Ben.