EBCDIC

Or, yeah, whatever it was.

What was the old IBM? EBCDIC.

Yeah, yeah, Episodic.

My God, my life used to be dictated by Episodic for quite some time.

Layer 6 is the universal translator and the chief security officer combined.

If two computers use different encoding systems, say one old mainframe uses EBCDIC and your laptop uses ASCII, Layer 6 translates the characters so they are mutually understandable.

Like a real-time digital diplomat.

Exactly.

It's a code with 64 combinations in the common six-bit BCD scheme.

And EBCDIC, the character set built for the System /360, is a direct descendant of those six-bit BCD codes.

The alphabet of the mainframe was drawn on cardboard first.

Early cards were different.

Somebody's got to hunt down what fields need to go in the output.

Where do I get them? Does it need to be reformatted in a particular way? Is the vendor expecting, I don't know, UTF-8, but I have EBCDIC or all of those kind of things come into play there.

And of course, I'll mention it and we'll probably touch on this, but it's very often a brittle thing.

You do that custom thing we're describing and change a field in one of those records, and that means you get to go back and rethink your custom extract program.