Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms: EBCDIC (pronounced "ebb-see-dik") (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Information Code)
EBCDIC (pronounced "ebb-see-dik") (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Information Code)
the numeric representation of characters on IBM mainframe computers. (Contrast ASCII, which is used on most other computers.) The decimal and hexadecimal numbers corresponding to the most commonly used EBCDIC characters are shown in Table 6. Note that the numbering of the letters of the alphabet is discontinuous. Some EBCDIC devices support a variety of additional characters.
An advantage of EBCDIC is that digits (0, 1, etc.) can be converted into numbers (0, 1, ...) by masking off the upper four bits of their EBCDIC codes, without doing any table lookup or arithmetic. For example, the EBCDIC code for 3 is hexadecimal F3, binary 11110011, and the binary number 3 is 00000011.
