Understanding EBCDIC: The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code

EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) is a character encoding standard that was developed by IBM in the 1960s. It was designed to provide a common character encoding format for use with IBM's mainframe computers and other systems.

EBCDIC is an 8-bit encoding scheme that uses a combination of binary digits (0s and 1s) to represent each character. Each character is represented by a unique sequence of 8 bits, with the most significant bit (MSB) representing the most significant digit of the character code.

EBCDIC was widely used in the mainframe era, particularly on IBM systems, but it has largely been replaced by other character encoding standards such as ASCII and Unicode. However, some legacy systems still use EBCDIC, and it remains an important part of computer history and culture.