It's a joke,.... as Fergal noted in his last line. And good for a chuckle on a Friday morning. If you every try to look at EBCDIC in a ASCII viewer, it sure does resemble encryption of some sort. As does ASCII in an EBCDIC viewer. Dan Robinson [log in to unmask] > -----Original Message----- > From: Stan Horwitz [mailto:[log in to unmask]] > Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 8:15 AM > > > On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Fergal Suipeil wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Christopher Ferraro wrote: > > > > > Can you read these .jobh messages with notepad or any > other application ? > > > > > > They seem to be encrypted someway. > > > > It's a form of weak proprietary encryption called EBCDIC. It was in > > widespread use in the latter half of the last century, .......... People who know what I'm > > talking about will also know that I'm joking (mostly :-) > > Huh? EBCDIC is not an encryption scheme. Its simply the way IBM > mainframes represent data internally. EBCDIC on IBM mainframes is > analogous to ASCII on personal computers. >