5 ms·

>which has no lower case This is exactly what bothers me. Why no lower case? Why not no upper case? You'd need the same number of keys, and it would be more le

>which has no lower case This is exactly what bothers me. Why no lower case? Why not no upper case? You'd need the same number of keys, and it would be more legible. It would use the same amount of space.

jacobolus 7y ago
Take it up with Émile Baudot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly about encoding, and barely incidentally about typography. And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities. A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible. As I responded to you elsewhere, the idea that capitals are hard on the eyes is just a myth. All caps with no spaces is bad, but that's because of the missing spaces.
toast0 7y ago
All caps means no ascenders or descenders, so actually less vertical space per line.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  This is a good point, actually. I'm still not sure it works, though - at the lower bounds of visual resolution, are capitals easier to distinguish than cursive letters? Because otherwise, any size capital can be compared to an equivalent box cursive, and I think the capital would be less legible. Perhaps the typically smaller eyes of cursive letters would swing the pendulum the other way, with smeary ink? I think with simply low resolution, cursive would always win out.
pjc50 7y ago
The explanation I've always heard was that writing "god" with a lowercase G would have been unacceptable in the 1850s. To a lesser extent, writing personal names without a capital is still seen as a bit odd and potentially an insult.

jacobolus 7y ago

Take it up with Émile Baudot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

pasabagi 7y ago
I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly about encoding, and barely incidentally about typography. And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities. A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible. As I responded to you elsewhere, the idea that capitals are hard on the eyes is just a myth. All caps with no spaces is bad, but that's because of the missing spaces.

toast0 7y ago

All caps means no ascenders or descenders, so actually less vertical space per line.

pasabagi 7y ago
This is a good point, actually. I'm still not sure it works, though - at the lower bounds of visual resolution, are capitals easier to distinguish than cursive letters? Because otherwise, any size capital can be compared to an equivalent box cursive, and I think the capital would be less legible. Perhaps the typically smaller eyes of cursive letters would swing the pendulum the other way, with smeary ink? I think with simply low resolution, cursive would always win out.

pjc50 7y ago

The explanation I've always heard was that writing "god" with a lowercase G would have been unacceptable in the 1850s. To a lesser extent, writing personal names without a capital is still seen as a bit odd and potentially an insult.