the entire jive about "EBCDIC-safe" was never
anything other than insanely bizarre. the concept
made no sense because there are keypunch patterns
defined for every byte value 0x00 through 0xff.
OS/360 "object decks" used those routinely.
they even had a way to "quote" a deck image such
that a "//" in the first two columns wouldn't
automagically terminate the object deck.
if they meant "printable in EBCDIC", then that
immediately produced a discussion about what
"character set" was on the print chain (or
print train for 1403-N1 printers) mounted
in the printer in question. Even more entertaining
was sorting out what happened when an RJE
workstation used a Dataproducts printer with
an ASCII-96 graphics print drum. The mapping
was glyph-to-glyph when possible. But the
usual "PN" graphics set didn't have lower
case (basically the FORTRAN/PL1 character set)
while the "TN" train was close to ASCII-96
if one would tolerate a few substitutions.
the ALA print train (used to print library
card catalog cards in the American Library
Association format) had a much larger set
of graphics but only one copy of the letters
and numbers so that on most output the
througput was cut in half.
egads - i'm having flashbacks from having
written a Unix print spooler that could display
Unix Man Pages (using TTY-37 graphics!)
on all the different printers attached
to the 370 at college.
Bad trip. Baaaaaad trip, man.
-mo
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