You are of course correct that 7-bit ASCII includes lower case characters. I don't think there exists "6-bit ASCII", but the original ASCII did not have lower c

You are of course correct that 7-bit ASCII includes lower case characters. I don't think there exists "6-bit ASCII", but the original ASCII did not have lower case (the slots were empty). We're talking early '60s here. I'm not even sure it was only about ASCII. I suppose I should have written a more generic "character set" (which supports or not lower case characters) rather than "7-bit". In the cases where you could only communicate in a single case (upper), you typed the commands in the usual letters (e.g., "LS") and capital letters were designated by a preceding backslash (e.g., "ECHO \JOHN \DOE"). That's why you were seeing the "\PASSWORD: " prompt, the initial letter was capital (as it still is). Just for fun, I checked my current Debian system. The getty(8) command still supports it: -U, --detect-case Turn on support for detecting an uppercase-only terminal. This setting will detect a login name containing only capitals as indicating an uppercase-only terminal and turn on some upper-to-lower case conversions. Note that this has no support for any Unicode characters.