Tapes and close to a quarter-century.

[Jerry Feldman]

On Friday 15 September 2006 3:22 pm, Jon maddog Hall wrote:
> Usually you can use the 'dd' command to easily read an ibm EBCDIC tape
> and convert it to ASCII.  Remember that most Unix systems (heck, most
> systems in general) use "ASCII", not "EBCDIC", so you might want to
> convert it, assuming that it is character data on the tape.
Years ago, when I worked at Burger King Corp as a programmer, we wrote a 
system to transfer data to the parent, Pillsbury.
We had Burroughs medium systems equipment (eg. EBCDIC). Pillsbury had all 
Honeywell (formerly GE) ASCII using the GECOS OS. They also had 36-bit 
words.  To read our tapes, required Pillsbury to go to a service bureau. 
The only common media was punched cards. if I recall, we couldn't produce 
ASCII tapes in a format suitable to Pillsbury. The communications system we 
wrote essentially sent punched card images into their RJE system. Most of 
the code we wrote was COBOL. Since Burroughs did not have a linkage editor 
at that time, every program was somewhat monolithic. Fortunately, you could 
write COBOL that looked like:
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
	ENTER SYMBOLIC.
		lots of assembler code
	ENTER COBOL.


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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