Which code is commonly associated with IBM mainframes and uses 8 bits per character?

Which code is commonly associated with IBM mainframes and uses 8 bits per character?

• A. UTF-8
• B. ASCII
• C. EBCDIC
• D. Unicode

Answer: (C)

IBM mainframes are historically tied to an 8-bit character encoding known as EBCDIC. This code maps characters to 256 possible values per byte and was designed specifically for IBM’s systems, making it the encoding most closely associated with those machines. By contrast, ASCII is a 7-bit standard (though it’s commonly stored in 8-bit bytes), and Unicode with its UTF-8 representation is a newer, universal scheme that isn’t tied to IBM mainframes. So, when asked which code is commonly associated with IBM mainframes and uses 8 bits per character, EBCDIC is the best fit.

IBM mainframes are historically tied to an 8-bit character encoding known as EBCDIC. This code maps characters to 256 possible values per byte and was designed specifically for IBM’s systems, making it the encoding most closely associated with those machines. By contrast, ASCII is a 7-bit standard (though it’s commonly stored in 8-bit bytes), and Unicode with its UTF-8 representation is a newer, universal scheme that isn’t tied to IBM mainframes. So, when asked which code is commonly associated with IBM mainframes and uses 8 bits per character, EBCDIC is the best fit.