I turned caps lock on for a week

Re:I turned caps lock on for a week by smoyer on Friday February 06, 2015 @05:53PM (#9012128)

Well ... I hate to advertise our technical debt but we've got a couple of mainframes that store every character string in upper case because no one has bothered to convert from the original EBCDIC [1] ... THIS IS REALLY GOING TO BOTHER ME!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC

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Re:I turned caps lock on for a week by alwold on Friday February 06, 2015 @06:49PM (#9012341)

It looks like EBCDIC supports lower case letters just fine. Any idea why they used all uppercase? I've noticed use of all uppercase on a lot of old systems, and always sort of wondered why. Is there a good technical reason? Maybe a data type that uses less space per letter?

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Re:I turned caps lock on for a week by Someone on Friday February 06, 2015 @07:53PM (#9012568)

EBCDIC has lowercase because it is _Extended_. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(6-bit):

"BCD ("Binary-Coded Decimal"), also called alphanumeric BCD, alphameric BCD, BCD Interchange Code, or BCDIC, is a family of representations of numerals, uppercase Latin letters, and some special and control characters as six-bit character codes.

[...]

IBM later created the 8-bit code EBCDIC (Extended Binary-coded Decimal Interchange Code) based on BCD."

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Re:I turned caps lock on for a week by ams6110 on Friday February 06, 2015 @07:42PM (#9012537)

Older line printers and early teletypes didn't have lower case.

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