EBCDIC

Abbreviation · Development

Definitions

  1. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code — an 8-bit character encoding created by IBM for mainframes. Predates and is incompatible with ASCII, and still lives on in mainframe environments today.

    In plain English: IBM's old way of turning letters into numbers for mainframe computers — different from the ASCII standard everyone else uses, and still haunting banks today.

    Example: "The bank's COBOL system sends data in EBCDIC, so our integration layer has to convert everything to UTF-8."

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