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In the early 2000s I had to interface with a credit card authorization and settlement system for a major credit card. I opened a socket, sent a perfectly formatted transmission, and got back gobbledegook.

Fortunately I had a computer history background and realized I was getting a perfectly sensible response...in EBCDIC.

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The endpoint accepted incoming ASCII but responded in EBCDIC? Or was this a binary packet with some EBCDIC-coded strings?

I was getting an error message back, apparently. So I needed to send EBCDIC too, but apparently nobody thought to document this anywhere.

It wasn't binary, but it was fixed length fields, which were surprising common in those days.

and hollywood tries to make us believe that we can easily talk to alien systems

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