Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code

Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding six-bit binary-coded decimal code used with most of IBM's computer peripherals of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

<character, standard> /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see'dik/, /eb'k*-dik/, /ee'bik'dik'/, /*-bik'dik'/ (EBCDIC) A proprietary 8-bit character set used on IBM dinosaurs, the AS/400, and e-Server. EBCDIC is an extension to 8 bits of BCDIC (Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code), an earlier 6-bit character set used on IBM computers. EBCDIC was [first?] used on the successful System/360, anounced on 1964-04-07, and survived for many years despite the almost universal adoption of ASCII elsewhere. Was this concern for backward compatibility or, as many believe, a marketing strategy to lock in IBM customers? IBM created 57 national EBCDIC character sets and an International Reference Version (IRV) based on ISO 646 (and hence ASCII compatible). Documentation on these was not easily accessible making international exchange of data even between IBM mainframes a tricky task. US EBCDIC uses more or less the same characters as ASCII, but different code points. It has non-contiguous letter sequences, some ASCII characters do not exist in EBCDIC (e.g. square brackets), and EBCDIC has some (cent sign, not sign) not in ASCII. As a consequence, the translation between ASCII and EBCDIC was never officially completely defined. Users defined one translation which resulted in a so-called de-facto EBCDIC containing all the characters of ASCII, that all ASCII-related programs use. Some printers, telex machines, and even electronic cash registers can speak EBCDIC, but only so they can converse with IBM mainframes. For an in-depth discussion of character code sets, and full translation tables, see {Guidelines on 8-bit character codes (ftp://ftp.ulg.ac.be/pub/docs/iso8859/iso8859.networking)}. {A history of character codes (http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html)}. E.g. the EBCDIC code for "A" is hexadecimal "C1". (2002-03-03)

<spelling> It's spelled "EBCDIC". (1996-12-13)

UTF-EBCDIC is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to five one-byte (8-bit) code units (in contrast to a maximum of four for UTF-8). It is meant to be EBCDIC-friendly, so that legacy EBCDIC applications on mainframes may process the characters without much difficulty.

Several mutually incompatible versions of the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) have been used to represent the Japanese language on computers, including variants defined by Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM and others. Some are variable-width encodings, employing locking shift codes to switch between single-byte and double-byte modes.

The programming language APL uses a number of symbols, rather than words from natural language, to identify operations, similarly to mathematical symbols. Prior to the wide adoption of Unicode, a number of special-purpose EBCDIC and non-EBCDIC code pages were used to represent the symbols required for writing APL.

ISO 8859

ISO 8859