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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

#81

Post by ddingus »

joezydeco wrote: post #75
thought_alarm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

And it made add on cards simpler, as well as cycle counting. In addition, the overall throughput of the CPU is better than most other machines, giving the Apple an effectively higher speed at that clock rate.

Overall, given memory expansion, the goofy screen didn't end up being too big of a deal. Most programmers made Y axis lookup tables and called it a day. The fact that the artifact color mapping repeated every word, two bytes, did have an impact in that it was generally faster to maintain two pre-shifted copies of software sprites though.

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

#82

Post by diplomatpuppy »

spzb wrote: post #20

I want to know why the Dragon 32 didn’t have lower case characters but displayed inverse coloured upper case ones instead. Used to play havoc with Basicode 2 programs.

The 6809 and accompanying Motorola 6833 SAM chip in your Dragon that handled the graphics was originally meant to be a video terminal - and uppercase was just fine for that. The later versions of the SAM did have a proper lowercase. Those showed up in later TRS-80 CoCo II but took a bit of prodding to activate.

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

#83

Post by pklausler »

pavlov wrote: post #11
baggy_trough wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at any normal written text, most of it is lowercase.

I think this is part of the reason why many systems in the past favored uppercase for programming languages: it’s easier to tell apart comments from code at a glance.

Many early character sets (CDC Display Code, UNIVAC's Fieldata) were only 6 bits wide, so there wasn't room for two cases of the letters until 8-bit EBCDIC and 7-bit ASCII came along.

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

#84

Post by csnover »

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...

This is not correct. The “word shape model” itself is actually probably wrong[0].

> The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975).

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-rec...

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

#85

Post by dhosek »

Reading Woz's talking about hand-assembling his 6502 code reminded me of my own practice which was the same. I would write out programs on graph paper with columns for the physical address, any labels and space for what the code would assemble to to the left of my actual assembler code. I would drop down to the monitor to hand-enter the hex code I would hand-generate. When you're working under constraints like this, you tend to be very careful in your coding. There's a part of me that still thinks in terms of the Apple ][ architecture when thinking about how a program works.

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

#86

Post by Syzygies »

fattire wrote: post #3

Some of the Apple clones, such as the Franklin ACE models and others, offered lowercase. Do a quick search for "apple II shift key mod" and you'll find vintage PDF instructions for adding it yourself.. https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification/II_I...

As a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II computer. (Eventually, computation established my career, just not on this machine.)

I recall making a "shift key mod" within days, that no doubt voided my warranty. It wasn't the mod described in this article. I recall some card that gave me 80 columns, Pascal, and increased my memory from 48K to 64K. I believe that my shift key mod involved cutting a single trace? In any case it worked. Various out-of-school friends learned computers on this machine, and changed careers. I learned the low memory locations like the back of my hand, and wrote crude Pascal programs, while my "real" code was in the relatively young C language on a Unix timesharing machine. That all changed when I bought one of the first Mac 128K's. Manx Aztec C!

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

#87

Post by ddingus »

saalweachter wrote: post #65
sumtechguy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the history of typography, capital letters came first, and it still remains standard in a number of contexts to use all capitals, for instance, almost all text you see carved in stone is all capitals, and most newspaper headlines are in all capitals. For some words -- for instance, proper nouns/names -- all lowercase is literally wrong. So to almost anyone, seeing a long block of text in all uppercase may look sto…

I used a similar point as an argument in primary school. They dinged me for sloppy cursive writing so I ended it right there.

All upper case, caps were just bigger than the others.

Stayed with that until I left High School. Was making some point or other, or was just a PITA.

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

#88

Post by exsf0859 »

thought_alarm wrote: post #64
tlb wrote: 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…

Err, as an Atari 400/800 owner, I can assure you that they did in fact have an overscan problem. Atari BASIC even defaulted to not printing to the first 2 characters and last 2 characters of each line.

Here's an example Atari BASIC program that uses POKE statements to change and then restore the default margins.

https://www.atariarchives.org/c2bag/page003.php

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

#89

Post by thought_alarm »

joezydeco wrote: post #75
thought_alarm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Right, but the Apple II video generator is already reading 40 bytes per scan line, and is using all 8 bits of each byte to generate the video signal. I would think that drawing 8 pixels per byte instead of 7 would have been the simpler thing to implement.

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

#90

Post by simias »

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...

It might be true to some extent but I don't think it's a complete deal breaker either. Look at Cyrillic print fonts for instance, the lowercase is effectively what we would call smallcaps in the latin alphabet: здравствуйте ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ. The р and у do deep lower in lowercase, but that's about it.

I really think it's a matter of habit and tradition more than anything else.

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