Phil,
Thank you for this precision. I started my career as a lexicographer on
an IBM mainframe at a big publishing house. And EBCDIC was alive and
well in the early 1980's there. Do you happen to know how the Atex
system was later developed? I gather Atex has been run on mainframes up
till this day. (E.g.
http://www.gxpress.net/atex-upgrade-allows-news-to-decommission-mainframes-build-on-integration-cms-1692)
Best regards,
Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx
*** Lexitec Online ***
Lexitec in English: http://www.lexitec.fi/english.html
Home page in Finnish: http://www.lexitec.fi/
To answer your original question, the Atex editor was actually a stand-alone operating system. It was written on and for the DEC PDP-11 family which (thankfully) used the ASCII character set.
The PDP-11 was a very advanced computer for its day. It had a very logical and versatile instruction set and a great CPU. I loved writing code for it.
