61–70 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.
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.
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..
https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.
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.
I actually didn't realize until I had to use a ][+ at school later that some computers didn't do lower case :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier 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
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!
I am sure this could be answered in a one liner but the article is going to be long as hell
Site down at the moment. Mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...
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.…
With the Apple 1 he also used 7 bits per character, but he stored them with 7 1024-bit shift registers.