Character Codes EBCDIC
| Field | Old IBM Mainframe programming |
| Went Obsolete | Mid to late 1980s (guessing) |
| Made Obsolete By | ASCII encoding became standard throughout industry |
| Knowledge Assumed | Understanding of byte organization within computer/files |
| When useful | Useful for analyzing core dumps - finding your strings |
Since IBM was one of the first to determine that a coding scheme would be needed to represent non-numeric, printable data, they devised their own encoding scheme: extended binary coded decimal interchange code. This coding scheme was used to map keyboard keys (upper and lower case alpha, digits, puntuation marks) to 8-bit values. This coding scheme was how alphanumeric data was represented in the computer's memory and files.
A similar scheme is used in computers today. But a different, non-IBM originated standard, ASCII is used to encode.
[This entry can be removed. IBM System i and System z still use EBCDIC every day as well as ASCII. EBCDIC will never be replaced by ASCII; it will be replaced by Unicode instead.]-Anonymous
Yes, IBM still uses this technology, there are many different EBCDIC character sets too which are used all around the world, probably by over 100,000 people.-Anonymous2
