Does anyone remember EBCDIC? IBM defined EBCDIC for the same purposes as ASCII, but ASCII took off with newer generations of machines. The last time I wrote an ASCII-EBCDIC conversion routine was the late 90's, part of generating a file for upload to a vendor's mainframe.
The .NET CLR has an EBCDIC text encoder/decoder in the base class library. I had to research this once when it was asked of me how easy it was to injest some COBOL-built files in C#. We ultimately didn't need to use that as the COBOL side had switched to ASCII at some point and its owners had forgot, but I suppose it is good to know that even modern .NET code can speak EBCDIC if need be.
