Re: Ichbiah's Letter

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Sun, 26 Oct 2014 17:59:12 +0000 (UTC), invalid <address@is.invalid>
declaimed the following:

>In the IBM environment this is essential for financial applications. To
>replace existing PL/I or COBOL systems or to allow Ada to be used for new
>development in a large percentage of applications, support for decimal types
>would have been essential. This is based on IBM's hardware decimal support
>which was present from the beginning of S/360 in 1964, which is mostly
>absent in other platforms (and should not be confused with floating point
>decimal in IEEE or other variations). 
>
	Scientific Data Systems (later Xerox Data Systems) Sigma series also
supported hardware Decimal (Packed BCD)... True, the Sigma were created by
IBM renegades <G> (they also used EBCDIC)

	I recall the term when most CompSci classes were rolling merrily along
-- all but the COBOL based courses... The Decimal hardware was out of
operation for most of the term.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/