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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

vintagecomputing.com

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Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#31

Post by dirkt »

thought_alarm wrote: post #16

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.…

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.

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#32

Post by zozbot234 »

mark-r wrote: post #19
hisham_hm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many of those older systems relied on peripherals that only did upper case, such as Teletypes.

Some getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by typing an all-uppercase username at login.

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#33

Post by croes »

varbhat wrote: post #4

I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.

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.

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#34

Post by thought_alarm »

tlb wrote: post #21
thought_alarm wrote: post #16

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.…

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.

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.

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#35

Post by JonathonW »

tlb wrote: post #21
thought_alarm wrote: post #16

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.…

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.

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).

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#37

Post by JKCalhoun »

wffurr wrote: post #29

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?

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.

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#38

Post by thought_alarm »

dirkt wrote: post #31
thought_alarm wrote: post #16

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.…

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.

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.

Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

#39

Post by nomel »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #15
varbhat wrote: post #4

I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.

Lowercase is simply easier to read because of more diverse letter and word shapes. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-rea...

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.

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