why do lower case letters even exist? in 100 years might they be done with?
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
Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
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Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#52Site down at the moment. Mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...
probably due to lack of money. zero checking. zero savings.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#54Earlier 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.
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).
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#55Did 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..
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#56I'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.…
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
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#58why do lower case letters even exist? in 100 years might they be done with?
you wrote your comment entirely in lower case. i'd imagine upper case letters ceasing to exist before upper case letters.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#59I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
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.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#60I 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?