Why does EBCDIC have gaps between letters?
This seems silly to me. Because the character codes were chosen to make the translation between the pattern of punches representing a character on a punched card and the bit pattern stored in memory as simple, straightforward, and efficient as possible. A punched card of the era in which EBCDIC was designed could be punched in any of 960 positions, arranged in a rectangle of eighty columns and twelve rows. The rows were conventionally numbered (from top to bottom) as 12, 11, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9; usually the row numbers 0 through 9 were displayed at every punch position across the card, but rows 12 and 11 were left unprinted. To store a character in one column of a punched card, one would punch out a particular combination of rectangular holes in that column. Digit-zero through digit-nine were represented by single punches in the correspondingly numbered column. Capital letters were represented by pairs of punches, one in row 12, 11, or 0 (at the top of the card) and the ot
