> In the early 1970s, I was very poor, living paycheck to paycheck. I'm just curious, was an engineering job at HP in the 1970s not well paid?
Define "well paid". Entry-level (relative) wealth is a recent thing.
Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
121–130 of 142 posts
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#122because 1 button... like the iphone or imouse? /s
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#123Earlier 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.
"Cursive" means slanted. "Current" means joined-up (from the french "courant", literally "running"). Not all cursives are current - Chancery cursive, for instance - and most recent schoolroom current writing isn't cursive.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#124Earlier 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?
I still read it once a month or so, when I've "finished" HN for the day and bored.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#125Earlier 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.
That's also how it was explained to me, back in the days.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#126Earlier 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?
I stopped because they were clearly monetizing content and the comments were overrun by nazis and they clearly didn't care
Edit: I coulda just said the nazis part but some folks here don’t wanna see ads so
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Cursive" means slanted. "Current" means joined-up (from the french "courant", literally "running"). Not all cursives are current - Chancery cursive, for instance - and most recent schoolroom current writing isn't cursive.
That may be what it means in a technical sense, but what most of us Americans were taught in elementary school was joined-up writing that was presented to us as "cursive," the only (and obviously much more sophisticated) alternative to "print".
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#128it seems they had an error connecting to the database for lowercase letters
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Cursive" means slanted. "Current" means joined-up (from the french "courant", literally "running"). Not all cursives are current - Chancery cursive, for instance - and most recent schoolroom current writing isn't cursive.
That may be what it means in a technical sense, but what most of us Americans were taught in elementary school was joined-up writing that was presented to us as "cursive," the only (and obviously much more sophisticated ) alternative to "print".
That was my experience exactly.
Re: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 scrollin…
So if a person maps them up, one gets basically C64 style display.
Yeah, auto-increment can rock! Blasting characters to the memory would be fast, and only require a precise index for the source data. Perfect for the 6502. Other index can be done every so often, depending on what is being drawn.