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It's inherited from CP/M. That's also where the 8.3 character limits came from. Interestingly, CP/M's filesystem did support lower case characters, but CP/M's C
by cbsmith 3y ago
It's inherited from CP/M. That's also where the 8.3 character limits came from. Interestingly, CP/M's filesystem did support lower case characters, but CP/M's CPP would convert whatever commands you gave it to the upper case before they are executed. DOS's filesystem was case insensitive, but they otherwise followed CP/M's conventions.
- fsckboy 3y agoCP/M copied DEC's operating systems, like RSX-11. They inherited the uppercase from the time when memory was expensive and 6bit ascii would fit more characters into a 36 bit word.
- whartung 3y agoWith MS-BASIC on CP/M, if you saved the file using lowercase, BASIC would not upshift it, and the CPP commands could not act of the resulting files. You’d have to fix it by removing the file within BASIC using the built in command (KILL I think) then saving it in uppercase. Can’t say MS considered it a bug or simply chose to not fix it for backward compatibility. It existed in quite late versions.