Pre-Unicode
Younger programmers have grown up with ASCII and Unicode as the only ways of representing character data in a computer. But in the dark ages, before we invented dirt and entered into the stone age, there were other contenders.
The Control Data Corporation used a 6-bit binary scheme called Field Data. This was due to their hardware. Thanks to IBM’s dominance in the market at the time, punch cards were encoded with Hollerith and later their mainframes and mid-range computers used Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), an 8-bit scheme based off Hollerith. Unfortunately, there were three different