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Because 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 upper

Because 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 ago
Many of those older systems relied on peripherals that only did upper case, such as Teletypes.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Some getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by typing an all-uppercase username at login.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Wonder 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 ago
    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 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.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      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.
      - megameter 6y ago
        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.
        ddingus 6y ago
        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!
        stan_rogers 6y ago
        "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.
        danaris 6y ago
        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".

Because 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 ago

Many of those older systems relied on peripherals that only did upper case, such as Teletypes.

zozbot234 6y ago
Some getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by typing an all-uppercase username at login.
sumtechguy 6y ago
Wonder 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 ago
  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 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.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    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.
    - megameter 6y ago
      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.
      - ddingus 6y ago
        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!
      - stan_rogers 6y ago
        "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.
        danaris 6y ago
        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".