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FD82: 29 DF AND #$DFWhy the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#42I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#43why do lower case letters even exist? in 100 years might they be done with?
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#44I'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.…
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.
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
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#47Imagine 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.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#48I'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.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#49Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Working at HP at that time was a pretty sweet gig. It would have been like getting a job at a FAANG today.