I Remember Floppy Disks

@Sharon
Oh, I've not come across EBCDIC. What was its principle?

I knew ASCII because I started to teach myself BASIC, and ASCII values of letters were fundamental to some string-handling routines I wrote as exercises.

@ArishMell Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code - it was just another way of expressing characters in binary. For example 'A' in ASCII is decimal 64 (41 hex), in EBCDID it's decimal 193 (C1 hex). You can see the codes here - http://www.simotime.com/asc2ebc1.htm

@Sharon
Thank you!

I was at school in the mid-1960s, when large organisations were beginning to find the money and physical space for these new computers, big tape-reels and all, and our Maths syllabus included a pilot thing called 'School Mathematics Project'.

SMP included Binary and Octal Arithmetic, and as usual with school maths course we were not told what if any uses these have; but I now realise this was in the days when doing even quite simple arithmetic on a computer required programming skills, and few could forecast most users would eventually not need that knowledge.