Could be one of the most pointless questions ever asked, but how do you pronounce EBCDIC? I’ve always said ebk-dick, but yesterday a rather older computer geek than myself said E-B-C-dick, and he should know better than I. I did a search and found someone saying it was pronounced ebs-dick.
Eb sih dick. The emphasis is on the eb and the sih is very short, but it comes out as 3 syllables.
Whenever i heard it pronounced by my elders and wisers they used a hard first C.
“EBCDIC? Oh now there’s a word i haven’t heard since…oh…before you were born.”
“I think my Uncle new it. He said it was dead…”
“Oh its not dead! Not yet anyway”
ETC.
I’ve always heard and said E-B-C-dick. On the other hand I’ve been told that Americans have all sorts of strange ways of saying it.
“knew” :smack:
As mblackwell says. EB-si-dik. (in the U.S.)
Another vote for ebb-see-dick.
As per mblackwell, EB-sih-dik.
I’m with mblackwell too on this one.
As someone who has spent 27 years in the computer industry in the US, I’ve always pronounced it (and heard it pronounced)…
ebb-sih-dick
…with emphasis as mblackwell describes it.
Um…
It’s pronounced just like it’s written, of course!
Sheesh!
Yup, what mblackwell said.
<off to refresh my memory on what it is – those classes in the major I abandoned were a long time ago!>
Wow. EBCDIC. Haven’t used that since I shot the reel to reel tape drive at my first publishing gig.
Put me in the EB-Suh-Dik crowd.
OK, folks, it’s been along time since I spoke IBM mainfrane, so help me out here…
Back in the 60’s and 70’s, the operating systems and applications in IBM mainframes used EBCDIC (“Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code” - does knowing that get me certified for something?) while the reset of the world used ASCII (which I think stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”, but I’n not all that sure about this one).
But now nobody seems to know anything about EBCDIC. What happened? Did IBM change its systems software or something?
as a programmer who made the transition from the IBM-based Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) systems to the more universal American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)-based one quite a few years ago (but still runs into occasional needs to translate data from EBCDIC to ASCII even now), “EB-sih-dick” was the accepted pronunciation.
basically, it’s just two different ways of prepresenting numbers, letters and formatting characters in binary form.
lachesis
While not a complete answer, this should clarify things a little bit: http://www.hack.gr/jargon/html/E/EBCDIC.html
By the way I should have thought to check the New Hacker’s Dictionary to start with; it lists three pronounciations, ebs-dick, ebk-dick and eb-sih-dick. Not E-B-C-dick, though, which appears to be the most common pronounciation in Sweden (three ancient geeks gave this pronounciation independently of each other, and Floater agrees).
darn, that’s what happens when you get distracted before hitting “Submit reply”. sorry if that seemed like just a rehash.
EBCDIC seems to be mostly IBM-propriety stuff. everyone else moved on to ASCII as a more universally-accepted standard, but IBM hardware stuck to its roots (at least, when last I heard). if Big Blue has moved onto another coding basis since then, I haven’t heard about it.
this does cause some interesting collisions when you try and swap data from one system to another. EBCDIC tends to “stack” numerics, cramming two digits into the same number of bytes normally used by one character (i.e., a 15-character number would only occupy 8 bytes, with the leftover half-byte used for the sign ["+/-"] that notes whether figure is positive or negative). this makes for REALLY interesting translations if you don’t have a routine worked in that unpacks the numerics and turns them into “normal” numeric equivalents. otherwise you get all kinds of gibberish. trust me on this one. i’ve torn my hair numerous times when i’ve tried loading data that no one informed me was EBCDIC-based.
lachesis
Back in 1972, in Canada, we learned it as EB-k-dick. We also forward-slashed our uppercase Os (to distinguish them from zeroes). Americans we encountered those early days, almost always pronounced it EB-sih-dick and slashed their zeros.
Odd, we used to put slashes on the zeroes. Very old microcomputers such as the TRS-80 did the same thing.
WillGolfForFood, the IBM mainframes still use EBCDIC, but pretty much all the software to get data in and out will do the translation to ASCII for you, so it’s not a big deal.
You do occasionally run into weirdness like certain characters that don’t have analogs. For instance, I don’t think there’s a carat symbol (shift-6) in EBCDIC, but they do have a symbol for logical negation.