[HN Gopher] Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters
___________________________________________________________________
Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters
Author : freediver
Score : 128 points
Date : 2020-09-10 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vintagecomputing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vintagecomputing.com)
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| I always find it fascinating how certain people who obviously
| understand computers on a very low level, like Woz, don't keep up
| with modern computing trends after a certain age. This website,
| vintagecomputing.com, is currently down because of Hacker News
| traffic. How is it that these people haven't continued their
| learning journey and learned about auto-scaling resources based
| on web traffic through the use of AWS?
| robterrell wrote:
| When I was a kid, I used to buy EEPROMs at the local electronics
| store and burn them with the Apple ][ lower-case characters. I
| sold them in my dad's computer store, along with a wire that
| would connect the shift key to the last paddle button on the game
| port. It was a common hack, and some software would actually
| recognize it and properly display upper/lower characters.
| rogueresearch wrote:
| Later versions of the Apple II line did eventually support
| uppercase. I forget which had it first, but the IIgs certainly
| did.
| Finnucane wrote:
| The II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and
| 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.
| js2 wrote:
| No, that's not correct. The II+ was a II with Applesoft BASIC
| instead of Woz's Integer BASIC, and the ability to
| automatically boot from disk at power on. That's it.
|
| Lowercase and 80 columns were available from third-party
| vendors for both the II and the II+.
|
| Source: I still own my II. Also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series
| Finnucane wrote:
| Huh. I got my II+ with the 80-column card installed. I
| guess I just assumed that was standard. Being more than 40
| yrs ago, I could be misremembering.
| js2 wrote:
| It was probably a Videx Videoterm:
|
| https://archive.org/details/Videx_Videoterm_Installation_
| and...
|
| It was common for Apple resellers at the time to sell
| them with third-party add-ons.
| cameroncooper wrote:
| Worth pointing out (for those interested) that Applesoft
| BASIC provided floating point support, and was provided by
| Microsoft.
|
| BASIC and the monitor were stored on ROM chips on the
| motherboard. The II and II+ were basically the same
| computer with a different set of BASIC ROM chips installed.
|
| Edit: It is actually possible to have both sets of ROM
| chips installed if you use a Firmware card. Very handy!
| byteCoder wrote:
| Actually, the ][+ was still 40-column, uppercase. I remember
| wiring a pin off my keyboard controller card to the paddle
| button input and add a replacement character ROM to get
| lowercase support.
|
| It was the //e and //c that had built-in lowercase support.
| te wrote:
| We had an Apple II+ with the limitations you describe.
| However, we purchased and installed the 80-column card that
| provided both 80-columns and lowercase characters, which is
| what I think the parent comment is suggesting.
| rz2k wrote:
| I remember adding 16KB or 32KB to get to a total of 48KB
| of RAM with a card that piggybacked onto the existing
| chips. Was that the same upgrade that enabled lowercase
| letters?
|
| I mostly remember that the RAM upgrade changed the gauges
| in MS Flight Simulator from octagons into rounder
| circles.
| mschaef wrote:
| Interesting... did the ][+ support an add on 80 column
| card? My hunch is no, but not sure at all
| zwieback wrote:
| Yeah, it did. Also a Z80 card so you could run CP/M. With
| CP/M I could run Fortran and C on my ][+, it was a lot
| easier to get pirated versions of CP/M SW than original
| Apple Pascal or Fortran.
| jcadam wrote:
| The first computer I ever used was a second-hand Apple ][e
| my parents brought home one day when I was little. I got
| started with BASIC on that thing.
|
| I actually didn't realize until I had to use a ][+ at
| school later that some computers didn't do lower case :)
| thought_alarm wrote:
| I've always wanted to know why Apple II video screen is only 280
| pixels wide.
|
| The Apple II video screen is 40 bytes wide, but it only draw 7
| pixels per byte, for a total of 280 pixels. The 8th bit was used
| for selecting the color pallet (eventually; initially the 8th bit
| was just ignored)
|
| Drawing 7 pixels per byte makes everything a lot more
| complicated, so it would seem to go against Woz's obsession for
| simplicity. It's hard to believe that 7 pixels per byte would
| reduce the chip count, and it certainly makes the software a lot
| more complicated (lots of divide-by-sevens).
|
| CGA graphics and the Atari 400/800 also provide a composite
| graphics mode similar to the Apple II, where each pixel lines up
| with the NTSC color burst frequency, but they draw 8 pixels per
| byte for a total of 320 pixels, and therefore use a wider portion
| of the screen.
|
| Perhaps Woz thought (incorrectly) that the NTSC screen wasn't
| wide enough to accommodate 40x8 (320) pixels so he cut it down to
| 40x7, or he planned all along to use the 8th bit to provide extra
| color. It would be interesting to know the actual reason.
| ddingus wrote:
| There is an upside to that madness, and that is the Apple had a
| 6 color high res graphics screen, and when only one pixel is
| used, it actually has a close to square ratio.
|
| Most 2bpp displays of that era made wider than tall pixels.
|
| The result, given creative use of patterns was a high res
| display that could pretty much do anything. Maybe not that
| well, depending, but 6 colors per line makes differentiating
| objects clear.
|
| 4 is not quite enough.
|
| I would like to know as well.
| tlb wrote:
| For text, a 5x7 dot matrix font fits nicely in 7 (wide) x 8
| (high). 8-pixel wide characters look funny: characters have to
| be an odd number of pixels to get symmetrical letters like A,
| so you either have 1 or 3 pixels spacing between.
|
| While NTSC allows 320 pixels, typical analog TVs overscanned a
| lot and you'd miss the right and left column or 2 of text.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| That seems like a big price to pay for slightly better text
| spacing. Virtually every other home computer used 6 or 8
| pixels per char/byte.
|
| I don't think overscan would be an issue. The TMS9918 is also
| (the equivalent of) 320 pixels wide, and it was used in many
| different home computers and game consoles intended to
| connect to the family TV. There's no overscan issue, unless
| it's connected to an Apple II monitor.
|
| When the TMS9918 is connected to an Apple II monitor there is
| a huge overscan issue, since the monitor is tuned for the
| narrower Apple II screen. It looks like this:
| https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0
|
| That's what got me thinking about this issue is the first
| place.
| tlb wrote:
| OK, but the Apple ][ was sold before special computer
| monitors were common. It was meant to hook up to your
| existing home TV. So what mattered at the time was the way
| most people's TVs were calibrated. They usually had a lot
| of overscan, because (a) 1970s picture tubes weren't
| square, they had a lot of rounding at the corners (b) the
| (all-analog) deflection & blanking circuits made fairly
| ugly artifacts at the edges which TV makers tried to hide.
|
| If they'd shipped with 320-wide video, a lot of people
| wouldn't have seen the prompt on the left hand side.
| sowbug wrote:
| Tangent: when we bought our Apple II in 1980, the
| salesperson explained that the "Sup'R'Mod" extra video
| box we also needed to connect to a TV was sold
| separately, manufactured by a different company, so that
| neither needed FCC certification.
|
| I don't know whether this story is true, but it's what we
| were told.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Wikipedia has a page on the Sup'R'Mod and cites this page
| for the same story with some additional detail:
| https://apple2history.org/history/ah03/ (see "Other
| Design Features" section)
|
| That's a funny little piece of computer history.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| The Atari 400/800 and the TMS9918 (TI 99/4A,
| Colecovision, etc.) are 320 pixels wide and were designed
| to run on those same 1970s home television sets, and they
| didn't have an overscan problem (maybe some sets did, but
| most didn't). I don't think the Apple II had to cut the
| screen width down to 280 pixels.
|
| That's the heart of the question. Did Woz think that 320
| pixels would not fit, or did he cut the width down for
| another reason, like more color.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Or, perhaps, he didn't want to pay for a video generator
| IC like a 9918 or 6845.
|
| If you look at the video generation circuit on an Apple
| ][ it's all done _in real-time in TTL, alongside the DRAM
| refresh activity_. And it 's all crammed into the
| normally unused tock of the 6502, making this work with
| virtually zero overhead on the CPU. That's the reason why
| the memory mapping of the screen isn't linear to the
| physical display. The software tradeoff was cheaper than
| the hardware one.
|
| http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/archive/Apple-II-
| Desc...
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Right, but the Apple II video generator is already
| reading 40 bytes per scan line, and is using all 8 bits
| of each byte to generate the video signal. I would think
| that drawing 8 pixels per byte instead of 7 would have
| been the simpler thing to implement.
| ddingus wrote:
| Actually, it's not.
|
| In the Apple 1, only 7 bits were output. Expanding that
| circuit to do graphics would take a byte and still output
| just 7 bits, simple.
|
| People are pretty sure the Apple 1 video circuit was just
| expanded to do graphics, which is why it's 7, and that
| left the high bit for a color shift.
| ddingus wrote:
| And it made add on cards simpler, as well as cycle
| counting. In addition, the overall throughput of the CPU
| is better than most other machines, giving the Apple an
| effectively higher speed at that clock rate.
|
| Overall, given memory expansion, the goofy screen didn't
| end up being too big of a deal. Most programmers made Y
| axis lookup tables and called it a day. The fact that the
| artifact color mapping repeated every word, two bytes,
| did have an impact in that it was generally faster to
| maintain two pre-shifted copies of software sprites
| though.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Speaking of add on cards, I own a TMS9918 video card for
| my Apple II. It's remarkably simple. The 9918 manages its
| own 16 kB of VRAM and it doesn't place any timing
| restriction on the host system.
|
| You'd think that the 9918 would be a bottle neck between
| the CPU and the VRAM, but the Apple II can write to the
| 9918 VRAM as fast as its own internal RAM. Faster,
| actually, since the destination address auto-increments.
| That was a surprise.
| ddingus wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| Hmmm, is the bitmap linear by line, or C64 style?
|
| Auto increment + C64 style would rock pretty hard. It's
| still good per line.
|
| Both have their merits.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Bitmap mode is made up of 8x8 tiles. The screen is 32x24
| tiles, or 256x192 pixels. 2 colors per line per tile. So
| a single tile can contain up to 16 colors.
|
| A single screen is divided into 3 separate tile maps,
| each 256 bytes long.
|
| It also supports 32 spirtes but only 4 sprites per
| scanline, which is its biggest limitation.
|
| The Sega Master System used an upgraded version of the
| 9918, adding 64 colors, smooth scrolling, and 8 sprites
| per scanline, all within the same 16 kB of VRAM.
| exsf0859 wrote:
| Err, as an Atari 400/800 owner, I can assure you that
| they did in fact have an overscan problem. Atari BASIC
| even defaulted to not printing to the first 2 characters
| and last 2 characters of each line.
|
| Here's an example Atari BASIC program that uses POKE
| statements to change and then restore the default
| margins.
|
| https://www.atariarchives.org/c2bag/page003.php
| ddingus wrote:
| Those margins make almost exactly the Apple display
| region active text.
|
| Interesting! I never noted that before.
| jecel wrote:
| Actually, the TMS9918 has a 240x192 text mode with 40x24
| characters of 6x8 each and several 256x192 graphics modes
| with 32x24 characters of 8x8 each. This is always fewer
| than Apple II's 280 pixels per line.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Right, but in text mode the 9918 draws 6 native pixels
| for every 8 NTSC color "pixels". So, measured in NTSC
| color pixels, it's 320 wide (40x8) compared to 280 (40x7)
| for the Apple II.
|
| This image (white text on a blue background) shows how
| the 9918's native pixels line up with the NTSC color
| burst frequency: https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0
| ddingus wrote:
| Yup. In the early days one of the first things I did to the
| TV's I setup for myself and others as monitors was to do a
| full CRT setup to put the entire safe area on screen,
| converge, color drive, etc...
|
| The Apple always fit. Atari machines often didn't.
|
| On my personal "monitor", I scored a finer dot pitch CRT and
| did a lot of work to put the entire frame on screen.
|
| Atari did allow wide screen DMA which used up nearly the
| entire active display area.
|
| I would run a 384x224 display on it sometimes.
|
| And after a full alignment, better CRT, one could read 80
| columns on the set and watch color programs look very good.
| JonathonW wrote:
| And a 7x7 dot matrix font fits nicely into 8 (wide) x 8
| (high)-- this is what the original IBM PC did. So it doesn't
| really make a ton of sense to go out of your way to make
| characters _seven_ pixels wide unless you 're anticipating
| that you're going to use that eighth bit for something else
| later (or you're really determined to have two pixels between
| each character rather than one for some reason, I suppose).
| ddingus wrote:
| I am inclined to think he was thinking about color.
|
| The phase shift makes a big difference.
|
| Having 6 colors and the artifact art variations was enough
| to do pretty much anything, not always well.
|
| Had it been 4 color, it all would have been far more
| limited.
|
| Frankly, the screen being good enough may be part of why
| graphics adapters never became common.
|
| I always thought they should have.
|
| Once accelerators took the 6502/816 to 4Mhz plus, a
| graphics adapter, perhaps combined with a faster CPU would
| have made a ton of sense.
|
| The power of the default was stronger due to that 6 color
| capability, IMHO.
|
| Compare 4 color CGA and it is notable.
|
| That said, CGA over NTSC was Apple like with 16 colors, no
| attribute clashing. That is what an expansion card for the
| Apple 8 bitters should have done.
| cameroncooper wrote:
| Woz loved these kinds of optimizations.
|
| With the Apple 1 he also used 7 bits per character, but he
| stored them with 7 1024-bit shift registers.
| mzs wrote:
| The 8th bit was never ignored, it was for phase, and for
| example determined if you saw green or orange. Probably the
| best ref for this is from '83, Gayler's "The Apple II Circuit
| Description."
|
| edit: corrected below, rev 0 non RFI (without the aux vid pin)
| ignored DL7
| thought_alarm wrote:
| Actually, the very first Apple IIs only supported 4 colors in
| hi-res mode. The 8th bit was ignored.
|
| A later revision added support for 6 colors, using the 8th
| bit to shift the pixels and change the pallet.
| mzs wrote:
| Thank, I just consulted appendix B of my copy, you are
| correct. DL7 is unconnected in nonRFI rev0 though every
| later Apple II RFI or not could do 6 color HIRES.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I've read that the 7-bit horiz pixels was a special Woz hack to
| save on cost. In 'fully'-addressable mode the nearby pixel
| 'swim about' as pixels are set/cleared in the vicinity.
| dirkt wrote:
| Don't forget that the Apple I was basically a glorified video
| terminal, so the text mode came first. Also in the Apple II.
| That's the reason there are 7 pixels horizontally per
| character.
|
| The graphics mode is just a juiced up text mode, so the 7
| pixels were kept.
|
| And for the video shift register, it's no difference if the
| input comes from the character ROM, or video RAM.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| That's another thing I've wondered about. Did the Apple I
| also output 7 pixels per character? Since it doesn't do color
| and doesn't care about the color burst frequency, it's free
| to use any size of pixel it wants. With a 5x7 font, I would
| have guessed that 6 pixels per char would be simpler.
| spzb wrote:
| Site down at the moment. Mirror :
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...
| jiveturkey wrote:
| probably due to lack of money. zero checking. zero savings.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| back then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call it
| now?
| ddingus wrote:
| still could call it that
|
| Either way, there will be some of us asking, "wut?"
| ddingus wrote:
| Maybe we can start something new!
|
| Attention bomb?
|
| Your suggestions here, go!
| supernova87a wrote:
| Whatever happened to Slashdot? Did the slowness of new
| stories appearing + their comments system turn people off
| eventually, compared to interfaces like here?
|
| I used to read them daily.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 10 years ago I scraped a representative slice of all /.
| postings from the fall of every year. It was apparent that
| the rate of new UIDs was falling and that the bulk of the
| posting was done by a limited and shrinking cohort in the
| range of 100K to 400K. Mobile boosted the prevalence of AC
| posts but that didn't compensate for the drop off. I ran a
| regression out and predicted they'd be dead by 2023. Looks
| like they're on track.
| g051051 wrote:
| After several management shakeups, the editors went off
| onto some weird tangents with video segments, allowing off-
| topic posts, and paid content masquerading as stories.
|
| That's when I quit. Why did you stop?
| dasil003 wrote:
| /. -> Digg -> Reddit -> HN
| eps wrote:
| Not being able to up/downvote comments was a major turn
| off. They'd throw whooping 5 voting credits in your
| direction every few weeks, but that only served to
| antagonize people even more. They tried to fix that by
| giving away meta-mod rights (to let you decide if other
| people's up/downvoting were fair), but again that wasn't
| what was needed. So as soon as HN had enough momentum and
| started to become a viable alternative people left in
| droves. It was a true exodus. Not really sure who stayed
| there...
| Stierlitz wrote:
| > back then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call
| it now?
|
| That was back when slashdot was a real tech site.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| The HN "hug of death" is one I've heard frequently.
| boogies wrote:
| Same, seems to have been used ~644 times (including at
| least one use of "Reddit (or HN) 'Hug of Death'") https://h
| n.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| (compared to 433 times "slashdotted" has been used here htt
| ps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..
| .). Edit: The number seems to change with the sort criteria
| (popularity/date). Weird.
| beervirus wrote:
| Written by Woz himself!
| modzu wrote:
| why do lower case letters even exist? in 100 years might they be
| done with?
| modzu wrote:
| since the responses have mostly been literal (no pun intended)
| perhaps i should clarify, i meant "case" in general
| beckyb wrote:
| they are _way_ easier to read than all uppercase.
| kps wrote:
| Lower-case letters evolved from handwritten Roman letters.
| Upper-case is exactly carved Roman letters. Mixed-case comes
| from initials -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial
| bonzini wrote:
| Some argue that mixed case texts are more readable because the
| ascenders and descenders provide "synchronization points" for
| our eyes in scanning text. Also (and less controversially)
| uppercase is larger so it is slower to read it, because there
| are more pauses to move your eyes to the beginning of the next
| line.
| modzu wrote:
| thanks for this. but c.f., javascript vs python syntax
| WY3JBHIL3KLPN5B wrote:
| you wrote your comment entirely in lower case. i'd imagine
| upper case letters ceasing to exist before upper case letters.
| dhosek wrote:
| Reading Woz's talking about hand-assembling his 6502 code
| reminded me of my own practice which was the same. I would write
| out programs on graph paper with columns for the physical
| address, any labels and space for what the code would assemble to
| to the left of my actual assembler code. I would drop down to the
| monitor to hand-enter the hex code I would hand-generate. When
| you're working under constraints like this, you tend to be _very_
| careful in your coding. There 's a part of me that still thinks
| in terms of the Apple ][ architecture when thinking about how a
| program works.
| ddingus wrote:
| Same here.
|
| Early on, I didn't have a machine of my own and would hand
| assemble programs to be typed in next time I could get some
| machine time.
| xchip wrote:
| I am sure this could be answered in a one liner but the article
| is going to be long as hell
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| True of most articles but doesn't automatically mean reading
| them is wasted time.
| ajankelo wrote:
| BECAUSE STEVE LOVED TO YELL!!!!!
| mmphosis wrote:
| FD7E: C9 E0 CAPTST CMP #$E0 FD80: 90 02
| BCC ADDINP ;CONVERT TO CAPS FD82: 29 DF
| AND #$DF
| spzb wrote:
| I want to know why the Dragon 32 didn't have lower case
| characters but displayed inverse coloured upper case ones
| instead. Used to play havoc with Basicode 2 programs.
| benjohnson wrote:
| The 6809 and accompanying Motorola 6833 SAM chip in your Dragon
| that handled the graphics was originally meant to be a video
| terminal - and uppercase was just fine for that. The later
| versions of the SAM did have a proper lowercase. Those showed
| up in later TRS-80 CoCo II but took a bit of prodding to
| activate.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support
| lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; neither
| of its major contemporaries, the Commodore PET 2001 nor the
| TRS-80 Model I, does either, despite being developed by major
| corporations with substantial resources.
|
| He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)--after the II's
| market success was proven--doesn't support lowercase letters.
| Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters,
| the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical
| support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is
| cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically
| use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another
| key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the
| shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of
| a wire to one of the paddle ports.
|
| The lack of support is because the company was working on the
| Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II
| series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase
| support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels.
| Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.
|
| Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III
| would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's
| bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would
| surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support,
| or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it
| were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple
| IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had
| surpassed the II series.
| notum wrote:
| Server was hugged by HN it seems.
| js2 wrote:
| Videx lower case chip to the rescue:
|
| http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentat...
|
| Another amazing bit of kit by Videx was a replacement keyboard
| controller called the Enhancer II:
|
| https://archive.org/details/Videx_Enhancer_II_Installation_a...
|
| The Enhancer II included the lower case chip.
|
| Videx also made an 80 column peripheral card for the Apple II.
| The company is still around:
|
| https://videx.com/
| hisham_hm wrote:
| Didn't the Apple II feature lowercase by the time of the IIe?
| My Brazilian clone of the II+ included the lowercase mod stock
| (even including Brazilian accented characters such as c and a).
| Max10101 wrote:
| It did, the upgrade for the Apple iie was the 80 column card
| which also gave 128k memory (from 64k). That was built in to
| the apple iic.
| fattire wrote:
| Some of the Apple clones, such as the Franklin ACE models and
| others, offered lowercase.
|
| Do a quick search for "apple II shift key mod" and you'll find
| vintage PDF instructions for adding it yourself..
|
| https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification/II_I...
| zwieback wrote:
| I did that on my German Apple ][ Europlus and also got a re-
| burned EEProm to display the lower case. I like the original
| Woz story but it seems strange that the later models didn't
| enable lowercase.
| Syzygies wrote:
| As a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for
| $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II
| computer. (Eventually, computation established my career, just
| not on this machine.)
|
| I recall making a "shift key mod" within days, that no doubt
| voided my warranty. It wasn't the mod described in this
| article. I recall some card that gave me 80 columns, Pascal,
| and increased my memory from 48K to 64K. I believe that my
| shift key mod involved cutting a single trace? In any case it
| worked. Various out-of-school friends learned computers on this
| machine, and changed careers. I learned the low memory
| locations like the back of my hand, and wrote crude Pascal
| programs, while my "real" code was in the relatively young C
| language on a Unix timesharing machine. That all changed when I
| bought one of the first Mac 128K's. Manx Aztec C!
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Yeah the Franklin Ace was mostly an Apple ][+ clone but had
| lower case (but no 80 columns). It's kind of a miracle so much
| software worked with that.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| > In the early 1970s, I was very poor, living paycheck to
| paycheck.
|
| I'm just curious, was an engineering job at HP in the 1970s not
| well paid?
| wffurr wrote:
| Imagine if Woz had had access to a UBI and universal healthcare
| instead of being super broke and living right on the edge. What
| could he have created with just a few extra resources? How many
| would-be Wozs are out there now too scared to spend that $300?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| He had a job at HP so no need for UBI (probably would have paid
| less than HP). Health care costs certainly were not an issue at
| his young age.
|
| Better instead if he had had some investor cash earlier. But as
| a hobbyist, he wasn't playing the "long game" anyway, just
| trying to make something cool for himself and bragging rights
| at the 'Brew.
| gcheong wrote:
| Doesn't sound like it would have paid much less and he would
| have had much more free time, but it seems he was so enamored
| with working at HP he didn't mind getting subsistence wages
| as an engineer.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Working at HP at that time was a pretty sweet gig. It would
| have been like getting a job at a FAANG today.
| gcheong wrote:
| It seems more akin to working at a game company where the
| companies take advantage of the fact that so many people
| want to work in the game industry they can keep salaries
| relatively low.
| varbhat wrote:
| I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from
| uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Lowercase is simply easier to read because of more diverse
| letter and word shapes.
|
| https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-rea...
| simias wrote:
| It might be true to some extent but I don't think it's a
| complete deal breaker either. Look at Cyrillic print fonts
| for instance, the lowercase is effectively what we would call
| smallcaps in the latin alphabet: zdravstvuite ZDRAVSTVUITE.
| The r and u do deep lower in lowercase, but that's about it.
|
| I really think it's a matter of habit and tradition more than
| anything else.
| nomel wrote:
| I would also say it's easier to read since, for the average
| 20 word 4.7 char sentence, about 99% of the characters that
| our eyes see, and we read, are all lowercase.
|
| edit: as in, perceiving that 1% case will require more
| effort.
| csnover wrote:
| This is not correct. The "word shape model" itself is
| actually probably wrong[0].
|
| > The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that
| lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is
| entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of
| their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more
| proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large
| quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will
| eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text
| oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly
| increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins,
| 1975).
|
| [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-
| rec...
| wongarsu wrote:
| Even if this is true and it's just practice, any new
| programmer still comes with years of practice in reading
| mostly lowercased text and very little experience reading
| all-uppercase text. In a field where everything gets
| reinvented all the time this should have a big impact.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| I can recall when using Mixed case in your Hollerith
| Constants was considered a bit flash :-)
|
| Hollerith constants where the way you did text to terminal IO
| in Early Fortran's.
|
| For example "Press 1 to exit, 2 to edit settings, 3 to start
| run?" instead of just "?"
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Well, Unix was typed in on terminals that only had upper-case
| fonts. So it all looked uppercase.
|
| Then when we got terminals that had lowercase fonts too, the
| Unix source was surprise! all lowercase. Because that's how it
| was typed in and nobody noticed.
| spicybright wrote:
| That's hilarious :)
| hisham_hm wrote:
| Because Unix won. Other contemporary OSes, like IBM's VM on
| mainframes, DEC's VMS, Digital Research CP/M and even
| Microsoft's MS-DOS and so on all favored uppercase.
| mark-r wrote:
| Many of those older systems relied on peripherals that only
| did upper case, such as Teletypes.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Some getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals
| - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by
| typing an all-uppercase username at login.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Wonder if it goes even further back to using morse code. As
| there was no 'case' in that just letters and numbers. Think
| the custom was to use upper case there. An interesting
| project to look into someday I guess.
| saalweachter wrote:
| In the history of typography, capital letters came first,
| and it still remains standard in a number of contexts to
| use all capitals, for instance, almost all text you see
| carved in stone is all capitals, and most newspaper
| headlines are in all capitals. For some words -- for
| instance, proper nouns/names -- all lowercase is
| literally wrong.
|
| So to almost anyone, seeing a long block of text in all
| uppercase may look stodgy or ugly or formal, but all
| lowercase looks wrong or provocatively artsy, so if you
| have to choose one or the other, all capitals is kind of
| a no-brainer.
| ddingus wrote:
| I used a similar point as an argument in primary school.
| They dinged me for sloppy cursive writing so I ended it
| right there.
|
| All upper case, caps were just bigger than the others.
|
| Stayed with that until I left High School. Was making
| some point or other, or was just a PITA.
| megameter wrote:
| I think a lot of students who grew up with ballpoints
| reached a similar conclusion. I knew a few and from time
| to time have used the strategy when legibility is
| required.
|
| Cursive was developed to work with traditional pens, and
| it really does not flow well on a ballpoint. But the
| school systems, of course, never made such a distinction.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| For me, it's mostly because uppercase letters either require
| toggling capslock or holding shift.
| croes wrote:
| Maybe because some international alphabets have letters that
| only exist as lower case. For example the german ss didn't have
| a capital form before 2008.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| If you look at any normal written text, most of it is
| lowercase.
| pavlov wrote:
| I think this is part of the reason why many systems in the
| past favored uppercase for programming languages: it's easier
| to tell apart comments from code at a glance.
| pklausler wrote:
| Many early character sets (CDC Display Code, UNIVAC's
| Fieldata) were only 6 bits wide, so there wasn't room for
| two cases of the letters until 8-bit EBCDIC and 7-bit ASCII
| came along.
| ISV_Damocles wrote:
| So you don't need to distinguish keywords from variables by
| case when you have syntax highlighting, and lowercase has been
| shown to be faster to comprehend than uppercase while
| driving[0], so switching that metadata signal to a secondary
| channel (color of the text) seems natural. colorForth[1] was
| made on a similar premise to exploit that channel, but as a
| read-write rather than just read channel.
|
| [0]: https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=475144
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth
| tyingq wrote:
| Word processing, perhaps? Wordstar/Wordperfect.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Did the Woz read the TV Typewriter article?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter
|
| I bought Don Lancaster's book from Radio Shack long ago...
|
| Also: what new technology are people desperately trying to get
| access to? I need to start the new Apple..
| benjedwards wrote:
| I asked Woz about the TV Typewriter before. In an email to me
| once, he said he had not heard about it at the time.
|
| https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s...
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