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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

vintagecomputing.com

131–140 of 142 posts

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

#131

> 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.

Remember, he didn't have a degree until 1987. And credentials mattered more back then.

When I graduated with a B.S. in 1982 I had 4 offers, ranging from $22K to $28K. It was enough for the two of us -- our apt was $275/month. But there wasn't a lot left over.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes I feel bad for HN, full of all us fleeing Reddittors

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/. -> Digg -> Reddit -> HN

Sometimes I feel bad for HN, full of all us fleeing Reddittors

I use both Reddit and HN. HN has much better content (both links and comments), but it has a singular focus on tech/things tech people generally like.

On the other hand, there’s a subreddit for practically every hobby. In many cases, Reddit is home to the largest community related to a hobby. Sometimes things related to my interests outside of tech pop up on here, but the discussion is rarely in depth.

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

#134

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.

I think the best part about Slashdot in its best days were the people. You could be reading and article about Python and it was possible to see Guido in the comments. And while that was rare, the other upvoted comments were usually high quality from really knowledgable people and the noise was held down pretty well. As the good commentors left, all that was left is the noise. If you go now and look at comments often everything is downvoted excepted for a small number of o.k. comments. But most of the experts and really knowledgable people are gone.

HN seems to have filled some of the gap it left but I don't know of any other site since that has the same volume of really high quality content. I see some comments here blaming the inability for everyone to do metamoderation - but I'd say it was the opposite. When they had decent editors things were great. Your content will be as good as your moderators and I think reddit proves that simply having more of them doesn't assure better content.

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

#135
post #85

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,…

I found one of my notes that I wrote code for manual assembly. It was the only way because I didn’t have an assembler. https://www.quora.com/How-did-you-learn-an-assembly-language...

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

#136
post #117
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's why the first point is more controversial. But the second is interesting: alphabets that lack lowercase, like Korean hangul, have bigger characters but they pack more information into each of them.

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

#139
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working at HP at that time was a pretty sweet gig. It would have been like getting a job at a FAANG today.

It seems more akin to working at a game company where the companies take advantage of the fact that so many people want to work in the game industry they can keep salaries relatively low.

true... But also at that time you did not make much as a developer anywhere. When I started this in the 90s if you made 50-60k you were the super elite of programmers and had been doing it for 20+ years. Usually if you stayed at a company they would take care of you. One guy I know went the full route at one of those companies and retired in the 90s his retirement was very nice. The dotcom bubble changed everything with respect to pay and long term comp.

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

#140
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.

Actually, the 6883 SAM (synchronous address multiplexer) is the DRAM controller and the 6847 VDG (video display generator) is the one that has the various video modes. See the character set implemented by the internal ROM in figure 20 of https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/ideas/mc...
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