Fixed Formatted Text Files

The invention of a fixed formatted text (flat) file layout started with IBM in the 1960’s. Data sets on the mainframe could be stored in both fixed and variable length records. A flat file is defined as having one record of data per row that is ended with a new line. Each field inside the record is represented by a fixed number of characters. While flat files can have either ASCII or EBCDIC encoding, I will be exploring the former. Another generalization of this format is to store numbers in…