3 ms·

Why old tech uses UPPERCASE so much?

dmurray 5y ago
The oldest encodings didn't always have both upper and lower case letters. So you picked one. For reasons of backwards compatibility similar to the one discussed here, DOS and Windows then decided to treat upper and lower case interchangeably in most contexts. FAT is a case-insensitive file system. As for why default to uppercase instead of lower case, I think just a matter of style. Unix and C favour lower case, FORTRAN and COBOL and your keyboard keycaps favour upper case.
- lloeki 5y ago
  > why default to uppercase probably to make sensible use of limited display abilities of early hardware, fitting characters in 8x8 boxes and making it readable on blurry fat beam glowing green screens quickly becomes a problem with lowercase (size, readability, ascenders, descenders, baseline), whereas uppercase is comparatively easy.
  - kragen 5y ago
    early hardware didn't have pixels or, except for debugging, screens; it had typebars which slammed bits of type into an inked ribbon and the paper. we're talking about 01930s to 01970s here. the baudot code didn't have separate codepoints for upper and lower case. in point of fact, it didn't have separate codepoints for numbers ('figures') and letters either; it had shift characters called 'figures' and 'letters'. but why uppercase rather than lowercase, you might ask? well, http://wiki.c2.com/?CapitalizingGod http://wiki.c2.com/?CapitalizingGod has the following story, but i don't know if it is correct. We may remember that ancient teletypes, printers, and terminals would bang out their output in all upper case. When this technology was first being standardized, the researchers did usability studies and found that people read lowercase text more easily than uppercase. But management decided to use uppercase instead. The reason? If only lowercase was shown, then there would be no means for CapitalizingGod. anyway, by the time people started putting screens and pixels on computers in the 01960s to 01980s, the uppercase-only tradition was very well established.
ric2b 5y ago
Lack of syntax highlighting is the reasoning in SQL, I think.
- prionassembly 5y ago
  SQL is incredibly easy to learn (even if you're learning concepts like foreign keys etc. at the same time) and really hairy to read, even with well-meaning indentation. Maybe there's a lesson from SQL and COBOL about prose-y programming languages for the hoi polloi.

The oldest encodings didn't always have both upper and lower case letters. So you picked one. For reasons of backwards compatibility similar to the one discussed here, DOS and Windows then decided to treat upper and lower case interchangeably in most contexts. FAT is a case-insensitive file system. As for why default to uppercase instead of lower case, I think just a matter of style. Unix and C favour lower case, FORTRAN and COBOL and your keyboard keycaps favour upper case.

lloeki 5y ago
> why default to uppercase probably to make sensible use of limited display abilities of early hardware, fitting characters in 8x8 boxes and making it readable on blurry fat beam glowing green screens quickly becomes a problem with lowercase (size, readability, ascenders, descenders, baseline), whereas uppercase is comparatively easy.
- kragen 5y ago
  early hardware didn't have pixels or, except for debugging, screens; it had typebars which slammed bits of type into an inked ribbon and the paper. we're talking about 01930s to 01970s here. the baudot code didn't have separate codepoints for upper and lower case. in point of fact, it didn't have separate codepoints for numbers ('figures') and letters either; it had shift characters called 'figures' and 'letters'. but why uppercase rather than lowercase, you might ask? well, http://wiki.c2.com/?CapitalizingGod http://wiki.c2.com/?CapitalizingGod has the following story, but i don't know if it is correct. We may remember that ancient teletypes, printers, and terminals would bang out their output in all upper case. When this technology was first being standardized, the researchers did usability studies and found that people read lowercase text more easily than uppercase. But management decided to use uppercase instead. The reason? If only lowercase was shown, then there would be no means for CapitalizingGod. anyway, by the time people started putting screens and pixels on computers in the 01960s to 01980s, the uppercase-only tradition was very well established.

ric2b 5y ago

Lack of syntax highlighting is the reasoning in SQL, I think.

prionassembly 5y ago
SQL is incredibly easy to learn (even if you're learning concepts like foreign keys etc. at the same time) and really hairy to read, even with well-meaning indentation. Maybe there's a lesson from SQL and COBOL about prose-y programming languages for the hoi polloi.