[HN Gopher] Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case inst...
___________________________________________________________________
Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead of lower
case?
Author : SeenNotHeard
Score : 102 points
Date : 2023-12-14 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
| FerretFred wrote:
| Those of us who had to endure CGA and EGA screens will
| understand. For me, legibility was all-important.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Heh. I once spent two days trying to understand why Fortran
| didn't know what cosine was. I had overshot the "oh" key and
| hit the "zero" key. Trying to spot the difference between "COS"
| and "C0S", on those fonts, when I didn't even realize that's
| what I was looking for, was... non-trivial.
| kevindamm wrote:
| A good font would keep the diagonal line inside a zero, even
| if it can only accommodate one or two pixels.
| chasil wrote:
| Because they didn't implement the entire ASCII set?
|
| Case in point would be Apple integer BASIC.
|
| https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
| wincy wrote:
| But doesn't that just beg the question? Why upper case and not
| lower case?
| chasil wrote:
| Uppercase is numerically 65-90, lowercase is 97-122.
|
| The numbers for uppercase can be represented in fewer bits.
|
| "To implement a major change like lower case (keeping 6 bits
| per character in my syntax table instead of 5 bits) would
| have been a horrendous and risky job to do by hand." - Steve
| Wozniak
| mannschott wrote:
| The early days of manual typewriters, paper tape, teletypes
| and vacuum tube systems, which already followed this
| practice predate US-ASCII, so I don't think the particular
| numeric values assigned by US-ASCII can have any
| explanatory power in answering this question.
|
| Me, I blame the Romans ;-)
|
| The Latin alphabet was initially only what we call the
| "upper case". What became the lower case came (a
| millennium?) later, first as an alternate style of
| handwriting and then as an addition to the alphabet along
| with rules about when which form of each letter should be
| used.
|
| Given the need to economize as in 5-bit teletype codes it's
| not surprising the chosen convention was to print (or later
| display) those codes as upper case as that is, historically
| speaking, the default.
|
| Still, I like to wonder if anyone every thought to build a
| teletype that printed in lowercase just to screw with
| people. :-D
| chasil wrote:
| The teletypes needed all the control characters as well
| (cr, lf, bell, etc.), so everything below ASCII 97 was
| mostly required.
|
| If I remember correctly, Apple terminal emulators set
| reverse video when they meant a capital letter, so you
| could converse with something over a modem that was
| sending lowercase.
| jstarfish wrote:
| I remember this being a space-saving technique on TI
| calculators as well. Some of them allowed using lowercase
| letters in console output, but why would you bother when it
| ate into the KB of total storage you had to work with.
| apetrovic wrote:
| You can type names with only upper case letters and be
| gramatically correct.
| tom_ wrote:
| Good point, APETROVIC.
|
| (it's a bit surprising how very few HN users avail
| themselves of the opportunity of capital letters in their
| display names...)
| hyperhello wrote:
| This clarification will be simply lost on many.
| KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 wrote:
| What is this ASCII of which you speak? Real programmers learn
| on UNIVAC 1100 series.
| https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nssdc/formats/UnisysFieldata.htm
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Or IBM BCD.
| chasil wrote:
| Ha ha ha. $ ftp EXEC8 Connected to
| EXEC8 (1.2.3.4). 220 1100JD1100 Service ready for new
| user. Name (EXEC8:luser): ^C
|
| That sure looks like ASCII to me.
| drfuchs wrote:
| Initially because teletypes only had uppercase, and those were
| the only tty devices available. And then when early CRT terminals
| became available, RAM was expensive, and you could save a whole
| chip by not storing one more bit per screen character.
| tgv wrote:
| I think it's from even earlier. IIRC, the first punch cards
| didn't distinguish between upper and lower case. These were
| used for basic administration, so one case was enough. E.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...
| nemo wrote:
| Teleprinters/teletypes go back further than you think. The
| first were in the 1800s. By the early 1900s teletypes had
| already become standardized around the time IBM developed the
| 80-column punchcard.
| mtreis86 wrote:
| Baudot predates both and doesn't have caps
| retrac wrote:
| I think paper tape and teletypes predate punchcards for IT
| applications. Baudot's work started in the 1870s, and fully
| automatic teleprinter systems were in operation by the 1900s
| (decade) [1]. IBM may not have been punching alphanumeric
| content until the 1920s (as your article suggests)?
|
| Baudot (the code, not the man) was 5 bits, so only 32 codes.
| It couldn't even fully encode the alphabet and the digits;
| shift codes are used to switch between two sets of symbols.
|
| Lowercase was added quite early though. Some hot metal
| casting typesetting machines ran on paper tape. They
| typically used six bit codes with multiple sets of shift
| cases. Upper, lower, digit, symbol, etc. (The physical
| construction of the teleprinter or typesetter had some
| relation to the nature of the code used.) The use of paper
| tape decoupled typesetting from the work of preparing and
| laying out the physical plate for printing. Typesetter and
| printer could be in different rooms or buildings, or maybe
| even on different continents; those tapes were being run over
| telegraph circuits by the late 1920s.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#Murray_code
| jasomill wrote:
| As a concrete example of what you're describing, here's an
| example of a code used with Linotype typesetting machines:
|
| https://archive.org/details/LinotypeHandbookForTeletypesett
| e...
|
| This code contains two shift states which map directly to
| physical Linotype features:
|
| 1. _Shift_ and _Unshift_ states map the first 45 codes to
| the 90 character positions in a standard Linotype magazine.
|
| 2. Some Linotype matrices (letter molds) have two font
| variants (e.g., roman and italic); the _UR_ and _LR_ codes
| shift between these.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The link goes on to answer the questions, but without it I'd
| ask:
|
| So why, then, were teletypes only uppercase instead of only
| lowercase?
| jlawson wrote:
| Probably because uppercase letters generally look better
| monospaced without descenders.
| kelnos wrote:
| Your answer doesn't actually get deep enough. You say "because
| teletypes only had uppercase" -- but there is still a "why?"
| there -- they could have only had lowercase instead. The
| article answers this in a more comprehensive way by examining
| the history of typesetting and written script.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Older computers put the text in a grid, and uppercase letters are
| designed to be read monospaced.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I don't think that's true. Uppercase I was narrower also on
| roman inscriptions. Just look at any inscription on old
| monument walls written in Roman capitals.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| At least he didn't say that the Romans used V instead of U
| because their letters had to consist of straight lines. For
| some reason, that "factoid" is Out There.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yeah. I think part of that factoid stems from some modern
| "ancient looking" Greek scripts used on souvenirs that use
| angular versions of capital Greek letters.
|
| Some of those glyph variations were used but rarely in that
| precise mixture that maximizes the angularity look, which
| seems to have been chosen in modern times to represent
| "antiquity"
|
| Here's a good table of the many varieties of the early
| Greek alphabet:
| https://mnamon.sns.it/index.php?page=Simboli&id=12&lang=en
|
| The latin script derives from the Etruscan script which in
| turn stems from some of the variety of the early Greek
| scripts (I forgot which one).
|
| An interesting fact is that the Roman cursive script
| retained many of the archaic properties of the original
| Greek script it originates, while the capital letters have
| been subjected to more evolution.
|
| In particular note the shape of the Roman cursive "m" (with
| the long stem on the left) and the "a" without the
| horizontal line.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive
| schoen wrote:
| Here's a nice example.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Res_gestae_Divi_.
| ..
|
| The Q is lovely (and very wide!).
| aldousd666 wrote:
| It's because they couldn't easily draw letters below the line. It
| was all block-aligned. They used blitted bits from a lookup table
| and copied them into squares on the screen that did not vary from
| letter to letter
| ryandrake wrote:
| What line? As you say, they were just bitmaps, so the font
| designer could declare the font's baseline as "3/4 of the way
| down the character bitmap and draw lower case letters just
| fine.
| nemo wrote:
| Lower-cased letters have both ascenders and descenders.
| Fitting both of those in 8 pixels is doable but leaves you
| with either the clipped ascenders or mangled descenders that
| you see in old 8-pixel lower-cased typefaces - your method
| works, but the results are poor. Upper cased Latin letters
| are far more amenable to rasterizing down to small sizes than
| lower cased.
|
| Though the real reason behind the question is that teletypes
| printed in upper case, early computers copied teletypes and
| followed that convention which carried on through the 8-bit
| era.
| gosub100 wrote:
| then it would look crappy relative to capital letters "Ajax"
| - if the j bottomed out where the A does, it messes with the
| whole look. There's a whole world that we take for granted
| that typesetters/font-makers/graphic designers have figured
| out for us.
| floren wrote:
| That's what e.g. the ADM-3a did and imo it looks a little
| funny but surprisingly pleasant: https://hackaday.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/02/adm3a.jpg
| sparky_z wrote:
| The question here was why they didn't use lower case
| letters _exclusively_ instead of using upper case
| _exclusively_. In other words, if you have to pick one, why
| did they pick upper case instead of lower case? The
| difficulty of mixing cases doesn 't apply to the question.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Exclusively lower case letters need more vertical space
| than exclusively upper case letters. "fgjl" has the same
| "top line" as "FGJL" but has a bottom line that's at
| least two pixels lower.
| tom_ wrote:
| You can leave a row or two free for the descenders, and it
| doesn't look too objectionable. An 8x8 grid is plenty for a
| useful character set. Some examples:
| https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys...
|
| There's even a couple of 6x8 ones here:
| https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other...
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| There are lots of 8x8 bitmap fonts for LCDs and 8-bit retro
| systems where they just didn't care about descenders being
| below the floor of the font. Aesthetically suboptimal but
| didn't stop them from being used in production.
| kps wrote:
| Choice of case predates video display terminals by a very long
| time.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| The computers my mother worked with (1960s?) only had 6 bits per
| character. So with 2^6 = 64 different characters, there weren't
| enough characters to have both upper case (26 chars) and lower
| case (26 chars) plus all the numbers (10 chars) and symbols etc.
| you'd need. So they only had upper case.
|
| I think it sort of stuck from there, that computers and commands
| etc. used upper case.
| amanda99 wrote:
| This is specifically about why they chose upper case, instead
| of lower case, given they could only pick one.
| cwillu wrote:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Pearl_Ha.
| ..
|
| Relevant, given computing's roots in military matters.
| coliveira wrote:
| In the beginning, encoding was done just for single letters, not
| for a combination of lower an upper case letters (it was an
| evolution that later lead to the creation of ASCII code set).
| This had to do with limited amount of storage in early computers,
| and the fact that people had to use punch cards to enter data.
| Upper case is preferred because it is more legible and the
| standard form of letters in the western world.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I I R nIR R LgIBL L RI LL x LI H.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Seeing it uppercase is jarring, but if we were used to it, it
| might be more legible.
| out-of-ideas wrote:
| right; its all subjective based on our experiences; if we
| were strictly exposed to upper-case only from the start,
| then it would be jarring to see lower-case later on
| kqr wrote:
| But now you're subsituting "jarring" for "legible".
| They're dependent, of course, but not synonyms.
|
| What's jarring depends entirely on what we are used to.
| What's legible depends among other things on how
| distinctive the shapes look to our visual system.
| Palomides wrote:
| word shape is extremely important for ease/speed of
| reading, so making text blocky and homogenous with no
| ascenders/descenders is empirically worse
| bonton89 wrote:
| I think parent means compared to all lower case, which would
| be the other alternative if still constrained by storage.
|
| Early screens also were very low resolution and without
| thinking much about it there is more ambiguity between lower
| case letters than upper case.
| jaipilot747 wrote:
| That actually does look beautiful
| kqr wrote:
| It could be more legible on low-resolution displays, while
| being less legible overall. E.g. Verdana and other typefaces
| with high x-height.
| vintermann wrote:
| I'm not convinced. I think I could live with that actually,
| even today. Certainly if I got used to it.
|
| Now that I think about it, I read a lot of comics as a kid,
| and most of them were in all caps (or at least, they did not
| have two clear cases). It didn't feel odd at all that all
| speech in Asterix, Donald Duck or Calvin and Hobbes is in
| upper case. I bet most people don't even notice.
|
| Isn't it weird that we spend so much effort to present text
| on computers in the way that we got used to specifically in
| printed books, once upon a time? The work that's been put
| into font rendering is crazy.
| sterlind wrote:
| that's middlecase, isn't it? that's basically the system
| Cyrillic uses.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| It's also interesting to note how many of these systems are still
| running on a daily basis for 50+ years now. Stuff like your
| airplane boarding passes and hotel bookings still use all-upper
| encoding because these systems go back to the 1960s [1]. Cheques
| and other bank documents still use those MICR typefaces, which
| are similarly still encoded in all-caps [2]
|
| [1]
| https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...
| vincent-manis wrote:
| The mainframe system I used in the 1970s had its printers with
| upper-case print trains. They did have one printer with an
| upper/lower train, so if you wanted to print a document out you
| submitted a batch job specifying that printer, and waited longer
| than usual for your output (because the print speed was lower).
| The computer centre management of the time considered document
| formatting to be an inferior use of their shiny equipment.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This is why in Common Lisp the internal names of symbols are
| normally (including all symbols in the standard) all in upper
| case. The default reader converts lower and upper case characters
| in symbols to upper case, and the default printer prints them in
| lower case (if no escaping is required), so you can write a
| program in lower case.
| kens wrote:
| The retrocomputing question mentions the theory that upper case
| was selected because it would be disrespectful to put "God" in
| lower case. I remember reading that explanation decades ago on
| alt.folklore.computers, so the story has been around for a long
| time: groups.google.com/g/comp.misc/c/vVW0wrfLaKw/m/tr-MsouDL5YJ
|
| The opposite question is interesting; is there anything
| historically that is lowercase-only?
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| I worked in hospitals and healthcare for a majority of my IT
| career.
|
| Clinical staff LOVE CAPS LOCK.
|
| To this day, I was never given an answer that made sense.
| out-of-ideas wrote:
| for me its also a matter of font; mix-match case+font+size and
| who-knows the difference between an 'l' '1' 'I' '|'. (small
| world i just was cursing at a pw-manager a few hours ago at the
| lack of distinction between some of these characters)
| mannyv wrote:
| One benefit to uppercase: is that an ell or a one?
|
| Upper case letters are more easily distinguishable, especially on
| low-res devices (like the old CRTs).
| layer8 wrote:
| But is that an O or an 0? Of course, care was taken to display
| them differently, and the same could have been done with l and
| 1, as coding fonts commonly do now.
|
| No, the real reason is that upper case was customary for
| telegrams and then teletypes. Upper case was well established
| before CRT displays came into play.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The letter O is considered harmful.
| pram wrote:
| 0 should have a bar through it by default imo.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| O or 0: that's why zero had that strike-through line.
| surge wrote:
| I was going to say that, early terminals had less resolution
| than many TV's, in the early days, especially as graphics
| drivers weren't standardized yet or had CPU/Memory constraints
| on how many pixels it could draw.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_display_standard
| somat wrote:
| The neat thing about crt terminals, or really any monochrome
| crt. is that because they don't use shadow masks. The text is
| crisp. Really good looking, Much more so than one would
| expect given the low resolution. Especially compared to text
| on a color crt.
|
| I sometimes wish monochrome displays were more of a thing.
| There is e-paper tech and text on it looks great for exactly
| the same reasons. but I would like to see what a high
| resolution monochrome LCD or oled display could do.
| toast0 wrote:
| > but I would like to see what a high resolution monochrome
| LCD or oled display could do.
|
| Monochrome LCDs are out there, but they mostly burn a hole
| in your wallet. They're used in medical imaging, but
| there's no other mainstream market for them, so the prices
| are high because the unit count is low.
| smileysteve wrote:
| This issue exists in some fonts and not others; ie Sans Serif
| fonts are horrible for legibility
| vintermann wrote:
| I've wondered if we went wrong with Unicode and trying to put
| every symbol mankind has ever invented on par with the Latin
| letters.
|
| Now I wonder if we went wrong allowing mixed case.
| 0xNotMyAccount wrote:
| It's a holdover from the days of Morse code. Recall the first
| computers were for military problems, and the first output was
| teletype. Teletype was originally for military messaging and that
| had a long history of using all caps because they relied on
| manual transcription of Morse code (and other codes) over wire
| and radio. The all-caps policies were put in place to make sure
| the officers could consistently read what the operator had
| transcribed. Some of these date back to the 1850s. The Navy
| didn't actually do away with all-caps until 2013.
|
| https://www.al.com/wire/2013/06/navy_puts_all_caps_communica...
|
| https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=489...
| pavon wrote:
| I think this makes more sense (or at least gets more directly
| to the point) than any of the Stack Overflow answers. Lowercase
| is easier to read in print as our minds learn the shapes of the
| words and can interpret whole words at a time rather than
| letter by letter. But Morse code was originally transcribed by
| hand, and it is easier for sloppily written lowercase letters
| to be mistaken for one another than the more distinctive
| uppercase letters, so it became a standard to write in
| uppercase. This tradition carried on to teletype and early
| terminals until both cases were supported.
| abathur wrote:
| As someone who had extremely poor handwriting as a child (it
| is still not great...), it makes a lot of sense to me that
| they'd land here.
|
| Over the years, being regularly
| mocked/embarrassed/reprimanded over my handwriting and often
| forced to re-write assignments led me to develop a weird
| print ~hybrid casing that substituted a fair number of
| uppercase forms anywhere my lowercase forms caused trouble.
|
| (This is mostly a fallback when someone can't read my
| cursive, or for official forms, package labels, etc. For the
| same reason I also adopted a smaller number of uppercase
| print capitals in my cursive.)
|
| When it isn't socially appropriate to use ALLCAPS or come
| across as a sTRANgE pERsoN, I have to be fairly
| careful/attentive when writing in print to avoid dropping
| into mixed case.
|
| (I'm not a monster; I'll scale these more like smallcaps when
| I write them.)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The Navy didn't actually do away with all-caps until 2013.
|
| And aviation still is full with it. For better or, in my
| opinion, worse... but aviation is so stuck of outdated and
| inconsistent crap in general...
| toast0 wrote:
| > Then Why is Unix Lower Case?
|
| It used to be, at least on some systems, if you logged in with an
| upper case user name, the system assumed you only did upper case,
| and all future output would be in upper case. In this case, Unix
| is in lower case, because you told it you could handle it.
| kps wrote:
| $ stty iuclc olcuc
|
| (You *nix may vary.)
|
| _Edit:_ To return your tty to normal, $ STTY
| -IUCLC -OLCUC
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Think of situations in which a font has a single case. Like say
| on calculator-like displays which have additional elements to
| show letters. You could see those on old VCRs for example:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/aloDSQh.jpg
|
| Notice they're uppercase.
|
| Now imagine this display but with lowercase letters:
|
| 1. In most letters the top half of the letter display is not
| used, but in some it is.
|
| 2. In some letters like "q y g j" you need a "descender"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descender), which means you need
| to extend the display further down, and add more elements.
|
| 3. Digits themselves are "capital only". There are no "small
| case" digits in most fonts, or in writing. Which makes capitals
| consistent with them.
|
| So capital letters are simpler, more visually consistent and as a
| result also I'd say more legible on displays where there's not a
| ton of text to begin with.
|
| Even on pixel displays where the "descender" or "unused top half"
| is not a technical problem, you still would need larger spacing
| between lines to fit the descender without some letters touching
| the line below.
|
| Capital-only is also the optimal choice when you need to print
| some small label on a device, or on a street sign, for example.
| It's a "STOP" sign, not a "stop" sign. No one does "small letters
| only" labels. It's either capitals only, or mixed case.
|
| TLDR: Capital letters FTW.
| kazinator wrote:
| Also, in Japan, some old equipment displays only katakana. No
| hiragana, let alone kanji. E.g. old cash registers and such.
|
| I have a Yamaha FX-500 (audio effects processor) from 1989
| (original owner!) which is like this: in the program titles,
| shown on the small LCD screen, you can use Roman letters, numbers
| and punctuation and also Katakana.
|
| I modded that thing about a decade ago, replacing the NVRAM chip
| with a small daughterboard with a batteryless chip; and replaced
| some RC4558 op-amps with NE5532.
|
| You can see pictures from the batteryless mod here:
|
| https://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20131110.004036.5ed12...
|
| I had to put a transistor onto the little board in order to
| invert one signal.
|
| That was all made possible by suddenly getting the schematics for
| the FX500 thing in my hands, so I knew exactly what the original
| part is and all its signaling and how to relate it to the
| batteryless AutoStore chip.
|
| I found the schematic on a Hungarian website called Elektrotanya,
| which at the time you could only join if you passed a small
| electronics knowledge test.
|
| In one of the images you can see a diode (nestled under the
| socket for the IC). This is part of the transistor circuit, which
| features a Baker clamp to speed it up.
| JdeBP wrote:
| I think that it's a bit of a reach there to blame 3rd century
| Latin for why computer/telegraphy people 16/17 centuries later
| decided to not retain the idea of lower case, when by that point
| it had been around in writing since the 10th century.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Sovereign Citizens have entered the chat.
| wduquette wrote:
| The earliest terminal and printer I used that supported lower
| case, supported lower case "without true descenders", i.e., the
| lower case letters had to fit in the same character cell as the
| upper case letters. Lower case "g", for example, was shifted up,
| which looked funny. Needless to say, we felt really modern and
| high class when we got hardware that supported "true descenders".
| (And of course all this was a built-in monospace font; font
| support was years in the future.)
| anonymousiam wrote:
| My first terminal was a Lear Siegler ADM 1A and it did not do
| lower case. https://terminals-
| wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_ADM-1
|
| The Teletype ASR-33, which was one of the most common "consoles"
| for early computers, also did not do lower case.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33
|
| So the answer to the article's question is: The hardware of the
| day did not support it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Distilling all the explanations, the answer is simple.
|
| When you're limited to one case, all-uppercase has a long history
| and we're used to reading everything from headlines and titles to
| telegrams and stone inscriptions in uppercase. It's natural,
| we're used to it, and uppercase came first historically anyways.
|
| Whereas all-lowercase isn't really a thing historically. You see
| some trendy logos or ads that use all-lowercase, but that's a
| pretty new thing. (Well, and then maybe back to e.e. Cummings for
| poetic effect?)
|
| At the end of the day, it's frequent to encounter text in all-
| caps, it's rare to encounter it in all-lowercase. So that's why.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Historically the distinction between upper and lower case has
| been one between different scripts for carved/engraved letters
| (where curved lines are awkward), and handwriting which does
| not have any such limitations.
|
| For example, the Romans which some might assume were "ALL CAPS"
| even by hand were actually writing more something like this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindolanda_tablets#/media/File...
| sterlind wrote:
| BUT THEN IF ALL-UPPERCASE WERE THE HISTORICAL DEFAULT, WHY DID
| MOST OF THE WESTERN WORLD SWITCH TO USING NEARLY ALL LOWERCASE?
| AND WHY DOES IT FEEL SO JARRING - EVEN RUDE - TO USE ALL CAPS?
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Because the distance between text and reader shortened after
| the arrival of the printing press.
|
| In Roman and pre Gutenberg eras, text was inscribed, eg on
| monuments. The reader might be a casual gawker, or someone at
| the base of a tower, or generally someone who could not be
| assumed to be in a position to engage closely with the text.
|
| Once print became widespread, that changed and the superior
| readability of mixed case won out- it was faster and easier
| to read. All caps was reserved for things that had to be
| consumable at speed, at distance and in short chunks, like
| newspaper headlines and mass media posters. Over time the use
| of upper case became synonymous with IMPORTANT and since
| shouting people inherently think their message is important,
| they used upper case too.
| danans wrote:
| > WHY DID MOST OF THE WESTERN WORLD SWITCH TO USING NEARLY
| ALL LOWERCASE
|
| It's easier to handwrite than with all Latin capitals. Also,
| the greater variation in size of characters makes it easier
| to read at higher text densities, like on the printed or
| written page.
|
| And from there, it spread mostly via imitation of style. If
| you look at most of the scripts in the world that don't have
| upper/lowercase distinction, they tend to be far less blocky
| than uppercase Latin script, and more like lowercase.
|
| > AND WHY DOES IT FEEL SO JARRING - EVEN RUDE - TO USE ALL
| CAPS?
|
| Because we are trained to interpret all-uppercase today as
| form of emphasis. Emphasizing everything, especially when
| it's not necessary, indicates a lack of social awareness. It
| would be similarly socially awkward to end every sentence in
| an exclamation mark.
| trealira wrote:
| I'm pretty sure lowercase letters originated with the
| creation of the Carolingian miniscule script[1].
|
| I had heard/read that it was created as a unification of
| handwriting under the Carolingian empire, but that may be
| untrue[2]:
|
| _"The use of the new script makes an experimental
| impression," says the Latin scholar. "They were trying it
| out. In the Middle Ages a script like this was not just
| invented, as is the case today. It was developed as part of
| the living tradition of a scriptorium. In the 8th century
| Corbie was something akin to a laboratory for new scripts."
| This is another point that militates against the idea
| propounded by many popular history books that in the
| framework of his cultural and educational policies
| Charlemagne more or less commissioned the devising of the
| minuscule with a view to creating a uniform, readily legible
| script._
|
| Prior to that, people wrote in uncial and half-uncial. The
| distinction between majuscule and miniscule letters wasn't
| there yet, but already then, they were enlarging and
| decorating letters at the beginning of the sentence back
| then. See this image on Wikipedia for an example[3]: https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script#/media/File%3AKe...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule
|
| [2]: https://www.uni-
| heidelberg.de/presse/news2013/pm20130109_min...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script#/media/File%
| 3AKe...
| quartesixte wrote:
| I like to also imagine that since telegrams were supposed to
| be short and direct, it was the written equivalent of yelling
| over a bullhorn. Anything more eloquent would be written by
| hand in proper casing (and cursive)
| anupsurendran wrote:
| Historically yes - uppercases came first. Even when lower cases
| showed up, the combination key sequence to get the lowercases
| working was harder so that took more time to catchup
| qingcharles wrote:
| For some infuriating reason, in 2023, all the police reports I
| see are still primarily written ALL IN UPPER CASE AND EVERY
| POLICE OFFICER OR CORRECTIONAL OFFICER HAS TO HIT THE CAPS LOCK
| KEY BEFORE THEY WRITE THEIR REPORT. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY THIS
| IS AND WHEN I ASK THEM THEY SAY THAT'S THE WAY THEY HAVE ALWAYS
| DONE IT AND THAT IS THE WAY THEY WERE TOLD TO DO IT.
| Tarucho wrote:
| Maybe because it makes it easier to read to people with
| impaired vision. Just a guess.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| This may have been answered already. Character sets are a
| continuous evolution from Morse code (which didn't have a notion
| of "case" or even punctuation), to the first, or at least early
| teletypes, which used 5-bit Baudot that didn't have
| upper/lowercase either.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
|
| Eventually, lowercase capable terminals came along and the more
| interesting question is, where did the cultural shift to
| "lowercase by default" actually come from? Unix? Very early Unix
| stuff was all caps because that's all they had, but eventually
| lowercase prevailed.
| teddyh wrote:
| According to legend (which I read somewhere), upper case was
| chosen because "Otherwise it would be impossible to spell the
| Deity correctly."
| paulorlando wrote:
| Good responses here already, but it's interesting to note that
| the early typewriters had the same issue. The noisy Remington No
| 1 was released in 1874, with all caps and no lower case. The
| shift key allowing both upper and lower case wasn't introduced
| until the Remington Model 2 in 1878.
| baking wrote:
| Line printers. We couldn't use mixed cases until dot matrix or
| daisy wheel printers came along.
|
| If the question is why upper case instead of lower case, there is
| a long tradition of handwritten uppercase only labels in drafting
| and mechanical drawing when precision is required.
| kps wrote:
| The IBM 1403 line printer (1959) had an available chain with
| 120 characters including both upper and lower case and various
| special characters.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| At least on home computers connected to crappy TVs via composite
| or coax, uppercase characters are almost certainly more readable
| than lower case characters just because uppercase characters use
| more pixels of an 8x8 pixel matrix.
|
| Also uppercase was also standard on Eastern European computers,
| and I doubt they cared whether they could spell GOD all uppercase
| ;)
| cf1241290841 wrote:
| >of an 8x8 pixel matrix.
|
| Some examples of the time (often 7x8)
| https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Fonts
|
| Another open source example for 8x8 and 8x16 is GNU Unifont
|
| You can go down to 5x5 for upper case while still being
| readable https://www.dafont.com/5x5-pixel.font
|
| Looked at the topic in the context of silk screen printing with
| normal steel mesh.
| xsmasher wrote:
| Thank you! All of this talk about teletypes, no one is
| mentioning how hard it would be to draw lowercase letters,
| monospaced, in an 8x8 grid.
| btilly wrote:
| If someone could comment on
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28146, the comment by
| Solomon Slow is almost right.
|
| The detailed history can be found in
| https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/unix-linux-history. In short,
| Unix was initially developed as an experiment in operating system
| design. But the investment of buying a PDP-11 to port it to was
| justified on the promise of creating a typesetting system for
| patent applications. And so it needed both upper and lower case
| early in its history. Since most English text is lower case, that
| was a sensible default to use.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think it's kinda weird that a lot of the toplevel comments here
| are offering (incomplete and sometimes incorrect) answers to the
| question, clearly without having read the highest-rated answer
| after following the link. That answer is much more comprehensive
| and goes into the history of typesetting and even writing.
| K0balt wrote:
| Teletypes. Many early computer systems were connected to
| teletypes as terminals.
|
| I cut my my teeth playing SUMER and programming Fortran on a VAX
| over an all caps teletype with an attached paper-tape
| punch/reader and on a good day I got to use one of the decwriters
| (a dot matrix printer-terminal.
|
| The vector screens (Tektronic?) were always in use by the
| engineering students, and I was just an 8 year old logging in on
| my moms account lol.
| wduquette wrote:
| Sumer! I translated a printout of Sumer my buddy acquired
| somewhere into the BASIC for RT-11 and played it quite a lot
| back in the late '70's. Almost nobody I know has ever heard of
| it.
| anononaut wrote:
| LOWER CASE IS BLOAT.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| We were used to yelling at our computers a lot more back then
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