Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

vintagecomputing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 142 posts

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

#111

Post by wongarsu »

csnover wrote: post #84
pilsetnieks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Even if this is true and it's just practice, any new programmer still comes with years of practice in reading mostly lowercased text and very little experience reading all-uppercase text. In a field where everything gets reinvented all the time this should have a big impact.

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

#112

Post by dasil003 »

g051051 wrote: post #101
supernova87a wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

/. -> Digg -> Reddit -> HN

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

#113

Post by megameter »

ddingus wrote: post #87
saalweachter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a lot of students who grew up with ballpoints reached a similar conclusion. I knew a few and from time to time have used the strategy when legibility is required.

Cursive was developed to work with traditional pens, and it really does not flow well on a ballpoint. But the school systems, of course, never made such a distinction.

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

#114

Post by khrbrt »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #37
wffurr wrote: post #29

Imagine if Woz had had access to a UBI and universal healthcare instead of being super broke and living right on the edge. What could he have created with just a few extra resources? How many would-be Wozs are out there now too scared to spend that $300?

He had a job at HP so no need for UBI (probably would have paid less than HP). Health care costs certainly were not an issue at his young age. Better instead if he had had some investor cash earlier. But as a hobbyist, he wasn't playing the "long game" anyway, just trying to make something cool for himself and bragging rights at the 'Brew.

OP's comment wasn't about Woz specifically but the population of potential Wozs who, but for a few hundred dollars, could have contributed something great to the world but didn't.

Right now a generation of young people in the United States are completely priced out of going to college, or facing eviction from COVID related layoffs. The slightly older cohort are seeing a much higher proportion of their wages go to high rents and student loan debt than Woz's generation.

As a society, we're are missing out on bottom up innovations because would be inventors are too busy trying to survive than to create.

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

#115

Post by rbanffy »

thought_alarm wrote: post #16

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 used for selecting the color pallet (eventually; initially the 8th bit was just ignored)

The palette selection was achieved by...

(Yes, it's that cool)

Shifting the 7-pixel group half-pixel to the left (IIRC, could be to the right). It was a trick used in HP terminals (Woz worked for HP) and printers to have nicer fonts without doubling the pixel clock and character ROM sizes.

For color, this put the pixels at offset positions in relation to the chroma wheel and that caused the switch from green/purple to orange/blue.

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

#116

Post by ddingus »

megameter wrote: post #113
ddingus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a lot of students who grew up with ballpoints reached a similar conclusion. I knew a few and from time to time have used the strategy when legibility is required. Cursive was developed to work with traditional pens, and it really does not flow well on a ballpoint. But the school systems, of course, never made such a distinction.

Totally.

I remember just quitting. 26 alphas + numbers and punctuation, and that's gonna be IT.

One counter argument was legal signature requirements. Had a parent from city hall clear the law up for me.

Was loaded for bear, and my little school really opposed not writing cursive. I remember a few of us, almost all boys going down the road.

Interestingly quite a few girls ended up with a sort of print-script we see in cutsie fonts today. Went totally without comment!

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

#117

Post by ars »

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.

There are plenty of languages without upper and lowercase, I've never heard of them being slower to read.

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

#118

Post by yesenadam »

csnover wrote: post #84
pilsetnieks wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Jazz pianist here. I had a weekly gig for a couple of years where the singer would choose songs and put the chord chart – | Eb C-7 | F-7 Bb7 | etc. – on the grand piano so the bass player could read it, and it was upside down for me. After a while, it almost seemed easier for me to read chord charts upside down!

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

#119

Post by jasomill »

ddingus wrote: post #87
saalweachter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the time handwriting was being taught in school, elbow problems (complications from hemophilia) made handwriting quite painful, so I was using a (silent, electronic) typewriter for in-class assignments.

Needless to say, typing handwriting assignments does nothing to improve handwriting!

Nearly forty years later, I still haven't learned to write in cursive, and my lower-case printing is either illegible or painstakingly slow. So, with the exception of single-character mathematical variable names, upper-and-small-caps it is.

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

#120

Post by kazinator »

thought_alarm wrote: post #16

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 Apple II graphics resolution modes could be mixed with text. So that is to say, in either the lo-res or hi-res modes, a hardware register setting would conceal a bottom portion of the graphics frame buffer, revealing four lines of the text mode.

I think all the circuitry for shifting out the pixels must have been very minimal and shared between the text and hi-res mode.

So, .. if you recall, the character cells in the 40 column text mode are all also 7 pixels wide. The character cells were 7x8. In that space, a certain font fit exactly, with a two pixel space between characters. Here is A:

   OOO   |
  O   O  |
  O   O  |
  OOOOO  |
  O   O  |
  O   O  |
  O   O  |
         |
  -------+
In high res graphics mode, you could create a bold font, by using the extra column:

   OOOO  |
  OO  OO |
  OO  OO |
  OOOOOO |
  OO  OO |
  OO  OO |
  OO  OO |
         |
  -------+
That was seen in a lot of games.

Anyway, the high res graphics mode pixels coincided exactly with the text mode pixels. You could imitate the text mode using high res graphics, and it would look indistinguishable. (Except for not being able to make the characters blink simultaneously, though even that could be sort of faked with page flipping.)

I think that in a 8x8 character cell that would result from a 160x192 mode (40x24 text), it might have been more awkward to design the font. You want an odd number of pixels, for symmetry, so probably characters will be 7 wide. 5 would leave 3 pixels of space, which might be too much. For designing 7 pixel font glyphs, maybe 7 scan lines is not enough height.

It's possible that part of the decision was around the design of the text mode and its font, and the high res graphics was tied to that, pixel for pixel.

Post reply on HN