EBCDIC code pages and ASCII-based code pages are incompatible with each other. Since computers only understand numbers, these codepages assign a character to these numbers. The same byte values are interpreted as a different characters depending on the codepage used. Data stored in EBCDIC require a code page conversion before the text can be viewed on ASCII based machines, like a personal computer.
A single EBCDIC byte occupies eight bits, which are divided in two halves or nibbles. The first four bits is called the zone and represent the category of the character, whereas the last four bits is called the di ...
EBCDIC was devised in 1963 and 1964 by IBM and was announced with the release of the IBM System/360 line of mainframe computers. It was created to extend the Binary-Coded Decimal that existed at the time. EBCDIC was developed separately from ASCII. EBCDIC is an 8-bit encoding, versus the 7-bit encoding of ASCII.
All IBM mainframe peripherals and operating systems use EBCDIC. Their operating systems provide ASCII and Unicode modes for translating between different encodings. Translation can occur within the hardware peripheral or in the softwa ...
