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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

vintagecomputing.com

71–80 of 142 posts

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

#71
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was probably a Videx Videoterm:

https://archive.org/details/Videx_Videoterm_Installation_and...

It was common for Apple resellers at the time to sell them with third-party add-ons.

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

#72

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.…

I've read that the 7-bit horiz pixels was a special Woz hack to save on cost. In 'fully'-addressable mode the nearby pixel 'swim about' as pixels are set/cleared in the vicinity.

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

#73
post #17

Site down at the moment. Mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...

back then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call it now?

The HN "hug of death" is one I've heard frequently.

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

#74
When I was a kid, I used to buy EEPROMs at the local electronics store and burn them with the Apple ][ lower-case characters. I sold them in my dad's computer store, along with a wire that would connect the shift key to the last paddle button on the game port. It was a common hack, and some software would actually recognize it and properly display upper/lower characters.

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

#75
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Atari 400/800 and the TMS9918 (TI 99/4A, Colecovision, etc.) are 320 pixels wide and were designed to run on those same 1970s home television sets, and they didn't have an overscan problem (maybe some sets did, but most didn't). I don't think the Apple II had to cut the screen width down to 280 pixels. That's the heart of the question. Did Woz think that 320 pixels would not fit, or did he cut the width down for…

Or, perhaps, he didn't want to pay for a video generator IC like a 9918 or 6845.

If you look at the video generation circuit on an Apple ][ it's all done in real-time in TTL, alongside the DRAM refresh activity. And it's all crammed into the normally unused tock of the 6502, making this work with virtually zero overhead on the CPU. That's the reason why the memory mapping of the screen isn't linear to the physical display. The software tradeoff was cheaper than the hardware one.

http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/archive/Apple-II-Desc...

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

#76
post #17

Site down at the moment. Mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...

back then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call it now?

still could call it that

Either way, there will be some of us asking, "wut?"

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

#77
post #17

Site down at the moment. Mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...

back then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call it now?

Maybe we can start something new!

Attention bomb?

Your suggestions here, go!

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

#78
post #56

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.…

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

Actually, the very first Apple IIs only supported 4 colors in hi-res mode. The 8th bit was ignored.

A later revision added support for 6 colors, using the 8th bit to shift the pixels and change the pallet.

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

#80
Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; neither of its major contemporaries, the Commodore PET 2001 nor the TRS-80 Model I, does either, despite being developed by major corporations with substantial resources.

He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.

The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.

Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.

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