September 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1040 pages
31h 23m
English
FIELDATA was a 7-bit encoding developed by the US Army for use on military data communication lines. It became a US military standard in 1960:
"MS" stands for "master space"; "UC/LC" are shift codes for uppercase and lowercase letters; "STOP", "SPEC", and "IDLE" stand for "stop", "special", and "idle". In this encoding we already find most of the characters used a few years later in ASCII. FIELDATA survives even today as the internal encoding of certain COBOL software.