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> Case insensitivity was a huge mistake in computing really original ASCII only had uppercase. When lowercase got added, gradually with newer systems and softw

> Case insensitivity was a huge mistake in computing really original ASCII only had uppercase. When lowercase got added, gradually with newer systems and software, without case insensitivity you would have had massive incompatibilities which probably would have hampered or even arrested the introduction of lowercase in new systems and all over again, when microcomputers first came out, they came out with uppercase only to cut complexity and cost on simple systems.

spullara 4y ago
This was the original mistake. Encoding the font into the letter representation.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Possibly, but this dates back to .. maybe the 7th century and Carolingian Minuscule?
- samatman 4y ago
  Capital letters aren't a matter of font. There's a difference between the river phoenix, a magical bird which lives by the river River, and River Phoenix, the actor. It isn't a presentation-layer difference, it's an encoding-layer difference.
  - Dagonfly 4y ago
    From wikipedia: "A capitonym is a word that changes its meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) when it is capitalized."
  - spullara 4y ago
    All bets are off at the beginning of a sentence.
jeffbee 4y ago
I don’t see how adding lowercase to ASCII could have resulted in massive backwards compatibility issues considering that uppercase-only ASCII existed for only a few weeks in 1963. Surely there was not widespread adoption of ASCII in the spring of 1963.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  I'm not old enough to be an expert, just old enough to have used the leftovers (new computers were too expensive!): many many devices were uppercase only, card punches, ASR-33 teletype, the Telex system, lineprinters, "glass" teletypes, FORTRAN, COBOL, and now that I think of it, Morse code/telegraph had always been. There was a ton of infrastructure that was uppercase only. You may be right that it wasn't ASCII's fault. Perhaps the first version of ASCII made sure to encompass what had been, and then saner heads said "let's allow for future progress". i'm not going to explore the entire history, but just looked this up. TL;DR example, the addition of lowercase characters represented a jump from 6 bits to 7 bits at the hardware level: "A six-bit character code is a character encoding designed for use on computers with word lengths a multiple of 6. Six bits can only encode 64 distinct characters, so these codes generally include only the upper-case letters, the numerals, some punctuation characters, and sometimes control characters. The 7-track magnetic tape format was developed to store data in such codes, along with an additional parity bit." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code

spullara 4y ago

This was the original mistake. Encoding the font into the letter representation.

pjc50 4y ago
Possibly, but this dates back to .. maybe the 7th century and Carolingian Minuscule?
samatman 4y ago
Capital letters aren't a matter of font. There's a difference between the river phoenix, a magical bird which lives by the river River, and River Phoenix, the actor. It isn't a presentation-layer difference, it's an encoding-layer difference.
- Dagonfly 4y ago
  From wikipedia: "A capitonym is a word that changes its meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) when it is capitalized."
- spullara 4y ago
  All bets are off at the beginning of a sentence.

jeffbee 4y ago

I don’t see how adding lowercase to ASCII could have resulted in massive backwards compatibility issues considering that uppercase-only ASCII existed for only a few weeks in 1963. Surely there was not widespread adoption of ASCII in the spring of 1963.

fsckboy 4y ago
I'm not old enough to be an expert, just old enough to have used the leftovers (new computers were too expensive!): many many devices were uppercase only, card punches, ASR-33 teletype, the Telex system, lineprinters, "glass" teletypes, FORTRAN, COBOL, and now that I think of it, Morse code/telegraph had always been. There was a ton of infrastructure that was uppercase only. You may be right that it wasn't ASCII's fault. Perhaps the first version of ASCII made sure to encompass what had been, and then saner heads said "let's allow for future progress". i'm not going to explore the entire history, but just looked this up. TL;DR example, the addition of lowercase characters represented a jump from 6 bits to 7 bits at the hardware level: "A six-bit character code is a character encoding designed for use on computers with word lengths a multiple of 6. Six bits can only encode 64 distinct characters, so these codes generally include only the upper-case letters, the numerals, some punctuation characters, and sometimes control characters. The 7-track magnetic tape format was developed to store data in such codes, along with an additional parity bit." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code