Comment by afiler
9 years ago
EBCDIC seems elegant in its own way: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cardint.htm (scroll down) -- apparently it's descended from IBM punch card formats. The discontinuity in the alphabet seems inconvenient for sorting, but it looks like it shares some properties (like bit-flip to make lower case) with ASCII.
The digits and letters actually map quite nicely to punch cards. You can see how punches 0 - 9 map exaclty to EBCDIC F0-F9. And if you check how the letters are coded on punch cards (1 - 9 plus one punch "above" in the zone and 0 rows) you can see how it maps exactly to EBCDIC C1-C9, D1-D9, E2-E9. Most other characters aren't coded quite as neatly, I don't know if there is a system to them.