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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

#101

Post by g051051 »

supernova87a wrote: post #99
spiritplumber wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whatever happened to Slashdot? Did the slowness of new stories appearing + their comments system turn people off eventually, compared to interfaces like here? I used to read them daily.

After several management shakeups, the editors went off onto some weird tangents with video segments, allowing off-topic posts, and paid content masquerading as stories.

That's when I quit. Why did you stop?

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

#102

Post by boogies »

pmiller2 wrote: post #73
spiritplumber wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same, seems to have been used ~644 times (including at least one use of “Reddit (or HN) ‘Hug of Death’”) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (compared to 433 times “slashdotted” has been used here https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Edit: The number seems to change with the sort criteria (popularity/date). Weird.

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

#103

Post by eps »

supernova87a wrote: post #99
spiritplumber wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whatever happened to Slashdot? Did the slowness of new stories appearing + their comments system turn people off eventually, compared to interfaces like here? I used to read them daily.

Not being able to up/downvote comments was a major turn off. They'd throw whooping 5 voting credits in your direction every few weeks, but that only served to antagonize people even more. They tried to fix that by giving away meta-mod rights (to let you decide if other people's up/downvoting were fair), but again that wasn't what was needed. So as soon as HN had enough momentum and started to become a viable alternative people left in droves. It was a true exodus. Not really sure who stayed there...

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

#104

Post by thought_alarm »

ddingus wrote: post #97
thought_alarm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of add on cards, I own a TMS9918 video card for my Apple II. It's remarkably simple. The 9918 manages its own 16 kB of VRAM and it doesn't place any timing restriction on the host system. You'd think that the 9918 would be a bottle neck between the CPU and the VRAM, but the Apple II can write to the 9918 VRAM as fast as its own internal RAM. Faster, actually, since the destination address auto-increments. Th…

Interesting! Hmmm, is the bitmap linear by line, or C64 style? Auto increment + C64 style would rock pretty hard. It's still good per line. Both have their merits.

Bitmap mode is made up of 8x8 tiles. The screen is 32x24 tiles, or 256x192 pixels. 2 colors per line per tile. So a single tile can contain up to 16 colors.

A single screen is divided into 3 separate tile maps, each 256 bytes long.

It also supports 32 spirtes but only 4 sprites per scanline, which is its biggest limitation.

The Sega Master System used an upgraded version of the 9918, adding 64 colors, smooth scrolling, and 8 sprites per scanline, all within the same 16 kB of VRAM.

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

#105

Post by sowbug »

tlb wrote: post #45
thought_alarm wrote: post #34

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…

Tangent: when we bought our Apple II in 1980, the salesperson explained that the "Sup'R'Mod" extra video box we also needed to connect to a TV was sold separately, manufactured by a different company, so that neither needed FCC certification.

I don't know whether this story is true, but it's what we were told.

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

#106

Post by wlesieutre »

sowbug wrote: post #105
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…

Tangent: when we bought our Apple II in 1980, the salesperson explained that the "Sup'R'Mod" extra video box we also needed to connect to a TV was sold separately, manufactured by a different company, so that neither needed FCC certification. I don't know whether this story is true, but it's what we were told.

Wikipedia has a page on the Sup'R'Mod and cites this page for the same story with some additional detail: https://apple2history.org/history/ah03/ (see "Other Design Features" section)

That's a funny little piece of computer history.

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

#108

Post by modzu »

bonzini wrote: post #43
modzu wrote: post #36

why 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.

thanks for this. but c.f., javascript vs python syntax

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

#109

Post by thought_alarm »

jecel wrote: post #98
thought_alarm wrote: post #34

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…

Actually, the TMS9918 has a 240x192 text mode with 40x24 characters of 6x8 each and several 256x192 graphics modes with 32x24 characters of 8x8 each. This is always fewer than Apple II's 280 pixels per line.

Right, but in text mode the 9918 draws 6 native pixels for every 8 NTSC color "pixels". So, measured in NTSC color pixels, it's 320 wide (40x8) compared to 280 (40x7) for the Apple II.

This image (white text on a blue background) shows how the 9918's native pixels line up with the NTSC color burst frequency: https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0

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