Phoenix.pm: quoting constant hash keys survey

[Victor Odhner]

Anthony Nemmer wrote:
> Hey, wow.  One of the things I collect is character sets.  If you still 
> have your old manuals, could you scan the character set table in for me 
> (if there is one) and send it to me?
> 
> Thanks,
> Tony

The character set was called BCL, which stood for Burroughs
Common Language, and I heard it pointed out that it was not
common and wasn't a language.  But really it was just a
variant on six-bit BCD, which originally was called Binary
Coded Decimal although it had letters and punctuation as
well.  I did my first off-hours consulting job on a little
Honeywell mini-computer, to schedule deliveries for a bakery,
and I prepared some of the COBOL code at my Burroughs workplace.
I had to do some translating from BCL to BCD before punching
out the deck, but the two character sets were pretty similar
- I think only some of the punctuation was different.

My contact with BCL was on the Burroughs B5500, and I guess
I last thought about it in about 1975.  The B6700/7700 used
EBCDIC.  In 1980 I moved into the Honeywell/GCOS world,
and in about 1988 started doing some Unix work, so I've used
nothing but ASCII since 1980.

Vic