Way Way Back

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a large variety of technologies over the course of my career. Yesterday I was working on an interface to an old government database, without the aid of documentation, natch. After a few hours I was able to extract data from the system, but I was unable to decode it. Google is a great tool (I couldn’t get 15 minutes into my day without it), but if you don’t know what to search for you can’t find anything. Thankfully some careful guesses led me to the Wikipedia entry for EBCDIC, a character encoding developed in the mid-60s.

“Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. EBCDIC descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding six bit binary-coded decimal code used with most of IBM’s computer peripherals of the late 1950s and early 1960s.”

It’s a fun thing in this industry to say you’ve worked with 50-year-old technology, but only once you’ve figured it out. Surprisingly there’s some modern tooling to interface with this particular encoding (yay Python!), so once I knew what I was dealing with it was straightforward enough. Maybe even easier than what it used to be, if this anecdote is to be believed:

EBCDIC: An alleged character set used on IBM dinosaurs. It exists in at least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern computer languages (exactly which characters are absent varies according to which version of EBCDIC you’re looking at). IBM adapted EBCDIC from punched card code in the early 1960s and promulgated it as a customer-control tactic, spurning the already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM’s own description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers blanch at the very name of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest evil.