A smaller set was also available, with uppercase letters only. In
addition the standard provided for an EBCDIC version, see in the
EBCDIC section about that. There is also a punched
card code for this version, see the section on
punched cards.
Here I show how the symbols are combined within a syllable. There are
six possible ways, depending on the form of the vowel and the presence
of a final consonant. The initial consonant is shown as a white block,
the vowel as a red block and the final consonant as a black block. It
is clear that (except for the possible final consonant) the form of a
symbol will change dependend on it's use.
Below a breakdown of the different symbols is given, given in a larger, more legible, font.
This table shows part of VSCII-3. It is similar to VSCII-2, but all
code points of uppercase vowels with tonal signs are omitted. Also the tonal
signs themselves are omitted, which is a bit strange. With this code you can
not even use combining tonal signs. In this table only the last six rows
are shown.
VISCII
Before the official standard (1992) a group of expatriate Vietnamese speakers
(Viet Std) came up with the standard code shown
above. It was named VISCII = VIet-nam Standard Code for Information
Interchange. It is similar to, and just as unexplainable as, VSCII.
VNCII (VPS)
And a third group, the Vietnames Professionals
Society, came with a third version, originally called VPS, later also
called VNCII (Viet-Nam Code for Information Interchange?). This code is
mostly used on Windows systems. An additional unexplained feature of this
code is the empty code points in the higher part of the table.
IBM
IBM was not a standards institute, but it was a major player, so
the following code tables are shown in this section:
Original EBCDIC
This is the original version of EBCDIC, IBM's own standard. Although it
has been claimed that it predates ASCII, that is not true, this standard
dates from 1964. Strange enough, IBM cooperated in the creation of
ASCII, but did not implement it. The main concern was cost of translation
of card columns to internal code which they thought should be done
entirely in hardware, something other manufacturers had already abandoned.
The sections outlined in red could be folded together to form a 64
character subset, that is where EBCD Hollerith
got it's name from. And obviously the symbol that would be folded to the
cursed 0-8-2 card code would not be present in some versions of
EBCD Hollerith. And also of course, the company being IBM, a single
standard was not sufficient, so there was an alternate version in use
where the dollarcent, vertical bar, exclamation mark and not sign were
replaced by open square bracket, exclamation mark, closing square bracket
and circumflex (caret) respectively. Note the move of the exclamation
mark here! A design consideration was that, although the alphabetics
were not contiguous, they would not be interspeced by non alphabetics.
This is clearly violated by the braces, the backslash and the four
banking symbols in the lower right quarter that are also present in the
standard OCR-A font (but these latter
four got very strange positions!).
Cyrillic EBCDIC
IBM came also with a Cyrillic version of EBCDIC. Here the lower case
letters and a bit of punctuation were replaced by Cyrillic letters.
The order is obviously the KOI order from GOST 13052, given
above. Some letters are put in a strange
position. Again by folding you would get a 64 character set, but in
this case some of the punctuation actually was not present, i.e. the
columns 11, 12, 15 and 17 were not present at all and from column 16 only
the Cyrillic letter, so the folded set consisted of only 49 symbols.
So actually there was no inconsistency by replacing < by a Cyrillic
letter but keeping > alone. (Or was there ...)
Japanese EBCDIC
Indeed, also a Japanese EBCDIC coding was introduced, shown above.
At first only a subset of the Katakana were defined (those in the
red box above), and this allowed a nice folding to a 64 character
set. Later the additional symbols from JISCII
were added, so folding was no longer possible. As with the
Cyrillic set, the new symbols replaced in part the lower case Latin
letters.
Revised Japanese EBCDIC
Of course, IBM came up with a revised (and hence completely incompatible)
version of Japanese EBCDIC. Here the defined symbols from EBCDIC were
left unchanged (except the dollar sign), and the symbols were filled in
order from the position of the space. I have no idea why the
position immediately next to the space was left undefined, and I do not
think I want to know. This code was used on the IBM System/3 computers
while the IBM System/360 and System/370 computers remained with the
previous definition. Can you say argh? But wait, there is more to come.
Augmented EBCDIC
In the mean time ISO had come up with additional symbols with the 8859-1
standard. This was implemented in EBCDIC of course. In this case the
additional symbols not in EBCDIC were just added consecutively in the
empty places in the code table (again skipping the position after the
space). Of course a variant of this occurred with the interchanges
mentioned above.
Revised Augmented EBCDIC
Later the previous version was revised, and by now IBM came up with
code pages for EBCDIC. Here we see code page 500, completely incompatible
with the previous version. We see the added (and sometimes changed)
control symbols taken from the then current ANSI standard. The rhyme and
reason behind the position of the symbols I cannot fathom. It completely
defies previous usage. Of course there is an alternate version with the
interchanges mentioned above, but here we did show
the version with square brackets in the alternate place. The version
with interchanged symbols is code page 037. It depends on the country
which code page you get, for instance in the Netherlands cp 037 is used,
in Belgium (just bordering south) cp 500 is used. But it not only depends
on country, but also on device. Some devices would print out symbols
different from others. One pretty unsure way to transfer e-mail was when
it was going from an ASCII site through a number of EBCDIC sites back to
an ASCII site. The probability that the result was the same as what had
gone in was not 100 %. It appears that there are currently 57 (remember
Heinz) versions of this standard.
The above may appear IBM bashing. And indeed it is. Consider my
frustration when I had to develop a C program concurrently on an IBM
mainframe and a Unix system. When I transferred a program by FTP
from the Unix system to the IBM mainframe, the IBM C compiler would
not compile because FTP and the compiler disagreed about the actual
codings of the curly braces. Editing with a Telnet (tn3270) program
was also problematical, here there was a another disagreement. And
now this sillyness is still present with the Windows code pages...
Russian version of EBCDIC from 1974
The Soviet Union standardization of 1974 also had an EBCDIC version.
It is based on their standard 8 bit code with the standard translation
to EBCDIC. The positions marked green are based on the similar ECMA
standard 111. Note that this completely deviates from the IBM
Cyrillic standard. This code has been used on IBM clones produced in
the SU.
Russian version of EBCDIC from 1987
In 1987 the Soviet Union switched to a new standard (which is the base
for ECMA 113 and ISO 8859-5). This new standard had also an EBCDIC
variant. Again the green positions are not in the standard itself.
I do not know whether this coding has been used much, I think not.
Thai version of EBCDIC
When the Thai code was standardized the standard also contained a standard
for Thai EBCDIC. Apart from the two Soviet Union standards above, about the
only official standard that mentions EBCDIC I think. The base code was an
EBCDIC display with only non-ISO-8859-1 part. I show it here based on CP 500.
EEC System 4
And in addition there were of course the versions of the competitors
that produced IBM System/360 look-alikes. Here we see a coding for
the EEC System/4 with considerable differences with respect to the
control symbols.