11–20 of 142 posts
I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
If you look at any normal written text, most of it is lowercase.
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/
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 ç and ã).
I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
Later versions of the Apple II line did eventually support uppercase. I forget which had it first, but the IIgs certainly did.
The II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.
It was the //e and //c that had built-in lowercase support.
I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-rea...
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.
I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
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.