🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Oct15.0...@csis.dit.csiro.au>
k...@csis.dit.csiro.au (Ken Yap) writes:

>FIELDATA
>        Don't remember anything about this except that it was on
>        a Univac and I never used it.

     I never worked on the Univac 1100s but apparently that was
its original code (six bits per character, you could put six in
its 36-bit word).  Newer 1100s offer the option of ASCII, stored
as one character per 9-bit quarter-word.

XS-3
        This was used on 80-column versions of the Univac 1004,
which was an electronic version of the old IBM accounting machines
(402, 407).  You still programmed it by wiring a plugboard, though.
I emphasized 80 columns above because the 90-column machines used
yet another code.  (Does anybody remember 90-column cards?)  I
never could make out any pattern in the way non-numeric characters
were stored in either code, but XS-3 stood for "excess-three",
which is how digits were stored; three was added to each value
(e.g. 0 was 0011, 1 was 0100, etc.).  This made it easier to handle
carries and stuff when designing circuitry to do decimal arithmetic.

Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.UUCP
I'm trying to develop a photographic memory.