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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
- js2 6y agoVidex lower case chip to the rescue: http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/video/videx_lower_case_chip.pd http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentat... Another amazing bit of kit by Videx was a replacement keyboard controller called the Enhancer II: https://archive.org/details/Videx_Enhancer_II_Installation_and_Operation_Manual https://archive.org/details/Videx_Enhancer_II_Installation_a... The Enhancer II included the lower case chip. Videx also made an 80 column peripheral card for the Apple II. The company is still around: https://videx.com/ https://videx.com/
- hisham_hm 6y agoDidn't the Apple II feature lowercase by the time of the IIe? My Brazilian clone of the II+ included the lowercase mod stock (even including Brazilian accented characters such as ç and ã).
- Max10101 6y agoIt did, the upgrade for the Apple iie was the 80 column card which also gave 128k memory (from 64k). That was built in to the apple iic.
- fattire 6y agoSome of the Apple clones, such as the Franklin ACE models and others, offered lowercase. Do a quick search for "apple II shift key mod" and you'll find vintage PDF instructions for adding it yourself.. https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification/II_I...
- zwieback 6y agoI did that on my German Apple ][ Europlus and also got a re-burned EEProm to display the lower case. I like the original Woz story but it seems strange that the later models didn't enable lowercase.
- NelsonMinar 6y agoYeah the Franklin Ace was mostly an Apple ][+ clone but had lower case (but no 80 columns). It's kind of a miracle so much software worked with that.
- Syzygies 6y agoAs a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II computer. (Eventually, computation established my career, just not on this machine.) I recall making a "shift key mod" within days, that no doubt voided my warranty. It wasn't the mod described in this article. I recall some card that gave me 80 columns, Pascal, and increased my memory from 48K to 64K. I believe that my shift key mod involved cutting a single trace? In any case it worked. Various out-of-school friends learned computers on this machine, and changed careers. I learned the low memory locations like the back of my hand, and wrote crude Pascal programs, while my "real" code was in the relatively young C language on a Unix timesharing machine. That all changed when I bought one of the first Mac 128K's. Manx Aztec C!
- varbhat 6y agoI don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.
- hisham_hm 6y agoBecause Unix won. Other contemporary OSes, like IBM's VM on mainframes, DEC's VMS, Digital Research CP/M and even Microsoft's MS-DOS and so on all favored uppercase.
- mark-r 6y agoMany of those older systems relied on peripherals that only did upper case, such as Teletypes.
- zozbot234 6y agoSome getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by typing an all-uppercase username at login.
- sumtechguy 6y agoWonder if it goes even further back to using morse code. As there was no 'case' in that just letters and numbers. Think the custom was to use upper case there. An interesting project to look into someday I guess.
- saalweachter 6y agoIn 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 stodgy or ugly or formal, but all lowercase looks wrong or provocatively artsy, so if you have to choose one or the other, all capitals is kind of a no-brainer.
- rogueresearch 6y agoLater versions of the Apple II line did eventually support uppercase. I forget which had it first, but the IIgs certainly did.
- Finnucane 6y agoThe II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.
- byteCoder 6y agoActually, the ][+ was still 40-column, uppercase. I remember wiring a pin off my keyboard controller card to the paddle button input and add a replacement character ROM to get lowercase support. It was the //e and //c that had built-in lowercase support.
- te 6y agoWe had an Apple II+ with the limitations you describe. However, we purchased and installed the 80-column card that provided both 80-columns and lowercase characters, which is what I think the parent comment is suggesting.
- rz2k 6y agoI remember adding 16KB or 32KB to get to a total of 48KB of RAM with a card that piggybacked onto the existing chips. Was that the same upgrade that enabled lowercase letters? I mostly remember that the RAM upgrade changed the gauges in MS Flight Simulator from octagons into rounder circles.
- mschaef 6y agoInteresting... did the ][+ support an add on 80 column card? My hunch is no, but not sure at all
- zwieback 6y ago
- thought_alarm 6y agoI'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. It's hard to believe that 7 pixels per byte would reduce the chip count, and it certainly makes the software a lot more complicated (lots of divide-by-sevens). CGA graphics and the Atari 400/800 also provide a composite graphics mode similar to the Apple II, where each pixel lines up with the NTSC color burst frequency, but they draw 8 pixels per byte for a total of 320 pixels, and therefore use a wider portion of the screen. Perhaps Woz thought (incorrectly) that the NTSC screen wasn't wide enough to accommodate 40x8 (320) pixels so he cut it down to 40x7, or he planned all along to use the 8th bit to provide extra color. It would be interesting to know the actual reason.
- tlb 6y agoFor text, a 5x7 dot matrix font fits nicely in 7 (wide) x 8 (high). 8-pixel wide characters look funny: characters have to be an odd number of pixels to get symmetrical letters like A, so you either have 1 or 3 pixels spacing between. While NTSC allows 320 pixels, typical analog TVs overscanned a lot and you'd miss the right and left column or 2 of text.
- thought_alarm 6y agoThat 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 the TMS9918 is connected to an Apple II monitor there is a huge overscan issue, since the monitor is tuned for the narrower Apple II screen. It looks like this: https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0 https://imgur.com/rGcRpw0 That's what got me thinking about this issue is the first place.
- spzb 6y agoSite down at the moment. Mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple-ii-didnt-support-lowercase-letters https://web.archive.org/web/20200910152535/http://www.vintag...
- jiveturkey 6y agoprobably due to lack of money. zero checking. zero savings.
- spiritplumber 6y agoback then we used to call it slashdotting, what do we call it now?
- pmiller2 6y agoThe HN "hug of death" is one I've heard frequently.
- boogies 6y agoSame, 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&query=hug%20of%20death&sort=byPopularity&type=all 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&query=slashdotted&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Edit: The number seems to change with the sort criteria (popularity/date). Weird.
- ddingus 6y agostill could call it that Either way, there will be some of us asking, "wut?"
- ddingus 6y agoMaybe we can start something new! Attention bomb? Your suggestions here, go!
- beervirus 6y agoWritten by Woz himself!
- spzb 6y agoI 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.
- benjohnson 6y agoThe 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.
- jecel 6y agoActually, 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/mc6847.pdf https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/ideas/mc...
- benjohnson 6y agoYour correct! It was the MC6847T1 update that allowed for lowercase.
- notum 6y agoServer was hugged by HN it seems.
- wffurr 6y agoImagine 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?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoHe 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.
- gcheong 6y agoDoesn't sound like it would have paid much less and he would have had much more free time, but it seems he was so enamored with working at HP he didn't mind getting subsistence wages as an engineer.
- sumtechguy 6y agoWorking at HP at that time was a pretty sweet gig. It would have been like getting a job at a FAANG today.
- gcheong 6y agoIt 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.
- sumtechguy 6y agotrue... 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.
- modzu 6y agowhy do lower case letters even exist? in 100 years might they be done with?
- beckyb 6y agothey are way easier to read than all uppercase.
- bonzini 6y agoSome 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.
- modzu 6y agothanks for this. but c.f., javascript vs python syntax
- ars 6y agoThere are plenty of languages without upper and lowercase, I've never heard of them being slower to read.
- bonzini 6y agoYes, 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.
- kps 6y agoLower-case letters evolved from handwritten Roman letters. Upper-case is exactly carved Roman letters. Mixed-case comes from initials — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial
- WY3JBHIL3KLPN5B 6y ago
- mmphosis 6y agoFD7E: C9 E0 CAPTST CMP #$E0 FD80: 90 02 BCC ADDINP ;CONVERT TO CAPS FD82: 29 DF AND #$DF
- jhallenworld 6y agoDid the Woz read the TV Typewriter article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter I bought Don Lancaster's book from Radio Shack long ago... Also: what new technology are people desperately trying to get access to? I need to start the new Apple..
- benjedwards 6y agoI asked Woz about the TV Typewriter before. In an email to me once, he said he had not heard about it at the time. https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s=20 https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s...
- WC3w6pXxgGd 6y agoI always find it fascinating how certain people who obviously understand computers on a very low level, like Woz, don't keep up with modern computing trends after a certain age. This website, vintagecomputing.com, is currently down because of Hacker News traffic. How is it that these people haven't continued their learning journey and learned about auto-scaling resources based on web traffic through the use of AWS?
- xchip 6y agoI am sure this could be answered in a one liner but the article is going to be long as hell
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoTrue of most articles but doesn’t automatically mean reading them is wasted time.
- robterrell 6y agoWhen I was a kid, I used to buy EEPROMs at the local electronics store and burn them with the Apple ][ lower-case characters. I sold them in my dad's computer store, along with a wire that would connect the shift key to the last paddle button on the game port. It was a common hack, and some software would actually recognize it and properly display upper/lower characters.
- ajankelo 6y agoBECAUSE STEVE LOVED TO YELL!!!!!
- TMWNN 6y agoWoz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; neither of its major contemporaries, the Commodore PET 2001 nor the TRS-80 Model I, does either, despite being developed by major corporations with substantial resources. He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports. The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive. Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.
- dhosek 6y agoReading 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, you tend to be very careful in your coding. There's a part of me that still thinks in terms of the Apple ][ architecture when thinking about how a program works.
- ddingus 6y agoSame here. Early on, I didn't have a machine of my own and would hand assemble programs to be typed in next time I could get some machine time.
- sedatk 6y agoI 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-and-which-one https://www.quora.com/How-did-you-learn-an-assembly-language...
- vagab0nd 6y ago> 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?
- stan_rogers 6y agoDefine "well paid". Entry-level (relative) wealth is a recent thing.
- nealabq 6y agoRemember, 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.
- coronadisaster 6y agobecause 1 button... like the iphone or imouse? /s
- chadlavi 6y agoit seems they had an error connecting to the database for lowercase letters