[HN Gopher] Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2...
___________________________________________________________________
Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2020)
Author : colinbartlett
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-05-10 21:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vintagecomputing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vintagecomputing.com)
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433135 - Sept 2020 (139
| comments)
| ourmandave wrote:
| Because you we're lucky to even get 40 columns (80 with an
| expansion card)?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 80 columns would have been borderline unreadable on the NTSC
| televisions they were using as displays.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Context for others: Standalone computer monitors per se did
| not exist at retail in 1977. The only choices were either
| televisions, or displays for security-camera systems such as
| the Sanyo VM-4209
| <https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1461694/sanyo-vm-4209/>.
| The latter, because of its high quality and perfect size for
| stacking on top of the Apple next to disk drives <https://www
| .reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/3snpqd/i_foun...>, became
| the iconic Apple II monitor of the early years until purpose-
| built computer monitors from Amdek and others, as well as
| Apple's own Monitor III
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Monitor_III>, became
| widely available.
| flomo wrote:
| Sure. As a practical matter, 90% of Apple II systems were
| plugged into a monochrome computer monitor which did 80
| column text just fine, and the other ~9% had a fancy color
| monitor. Nobody* used an Apple II with a TV, except in maybe
| the very early days.
|
| This is why you should ignore the specs, the Apple didn't
| really compete with Atari/Commodore/etc. It got crushed by
| the IBM PC.
| sillystu04 wrote:
| I wish modern computers considered casing to be purely a matter
| of style, such that "S" == "s" evaluates to true.
|
| Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is
| widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented
| in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com
| and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
|
| Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward,
| particularly with German.
|
| Sadly it's too late to change this because doing so would be such
| a breaking change.
| amelius wrote:
| I like that I can write: Window* window = new
| Window(...)
| sillystu04 wrote:
| You probably don't like this: String string =
| "String.com";
| amelius wrote:
| I don't see the problem to be honest.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I can't imagine that working in any programming language,
| given the smart quotes.
| tedunangst wrote:
| You don't need case sensitivity for that.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps if you redesigned the language. But case
| sensitivity makes things a lot clearer.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| But modern computers do that for the most part. Standard search
| features default to case insensitivity and Windows & Mac OS
| have a case insensitive file system. But in other contexts it
| doesn't make sense considering it's part of the grammar.
|
| > Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward,
| particularly with German
|
| How would it make anything more awkward?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Standard search features, for example the start menu of
| Windows have so severe bugs and shortcomings, that I am not
| sure they get anything right and would not trust them with
| lower und upper case either. For example type too early in
| the start menu, and you might just find nothing, after which
| it might search online. If you delete the text and type
| again, suddenly it finds stuff... critical race right there.
| Or how it finds something, when one types the first 3 letters
| that match, but when typing the fourth letter, the search
| result disappears...
|
| People make searches so broken, it makes me think they have
| no idea what they are doing. The bigger the company, the
| worse the search usually is. I think it is maybe a result of
| non-tech companies hiring silly contractors, who do half-
| assed work, hoping that people will be so happy, that they
| get another contract later. Their customers are not the
| users, but the company that hired them. In case of MS it is
| probably ... hm, idk, sheer incompetence, I guess.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Oh, I fully agree about Windows search. But that's more a
| case of a company just having no incentives to make their
| product usable because people buy it anyway.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and
| foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
|
| I like it when such sites have a bug bounty program, or free
| offers for new users. Free money is nice.
| volemo wrote:
| I wish [1] our (western) culture was not built on a bicameral
| [2] alphabet, but c'est la vie: uppercase and lowercase are
| distinct through out our lives, and thus computers must not
| break the norm. "MW" != "mW" and "Taylor" != "taylor".
|
| [1]: Capitalisation could have been made purely stylistic, the
| same way italics are -- it's a helpful hint for the reader, but
| isn't expected to convey meaning on its own, therefore,
| generally can be stripped without loss of information.
|
| [2]: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicase
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Casing is rarely semantically important
|
| Yet you're using it yourself.
|
| I'd rather we stop using capitals than have to make everything
| case-insensitive. Case-insensitivity is so very annoying to me.
|
| But you're in luck: case-insensitivity is available in many
| contexts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Back in 1978, I made my own keyboard for a single board 6800
| computer I designed, also because I could not afford a keyboard.
|
| I went to a surplus store and bought an EBCDIC keyboard for a
| couple bucks. I unsoldered all the keys from the circuit board. I
| took a plastic board, and using the old circuit board, drilled
| holes in it. Inserted the keys in the holes, and then wired it up
| in an 8x8 grid pattern. The two 8 bits gave 64 possible keys,
| which was enough, connecting those to an I/O port enabled
| recognizing which key was down.
|
| It worked fine as long as you were careful not to press more than
| one key at a time.
|
| I don't recall what I did with that computer. It's all gone,
| including the design notebook for it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Could the code subtract out the previous key for two
| overlapping key presses, or was it a very strict one at a time?
| throwanem wrote:
| If I had to guess, the sixty or so diodes required for an
| NKRO matrix might have blown the money budget for the
| project, about like trying to do that kind of work in an
| interrupt handler would blow the cycle budget for any
| interesting program even had it been possible. Typing more
| slowly is free.
|
| Hard to say. I would need to look up component prices for a
| few years prior to my birth, and it would take me a few
| minutes to find that archive of 70s Radio Shack catalogs
| again - though I believe it was actually posted here, so. Of
| course anyone serious enough to be building an entire
| computer in those days, brilliant keyboard hack and all,
| probably wouldn't be sourcing a jellybean part like 1N400x
| signal diodes one by each...
| WalterBright wrote:
| The keys I used weren't jellybean. They were excellent
| keys. They were in the surplus bin because EBCDIC keyboards
| were already obsolete by then.
|
| I had very little money at the time, and scrounged for
| parts.
| throwanem wrote:
| By "jellybean" I meant the sort of small signal diodes
| one might use to prevent aliasing in a keyboard matrix. I
| know where I'd have gone to get those in my twenties, but
| not really how I'd have afforded that many for one
| project, even at the (very) small discount they might
| have given me on an order of that size.
|
| Unfortunately, now that I've finally reached a point of
| being able to really effectively use such a resource as
| that store, in its place now stands a Sonic drive-in. So
| it goes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Many keyboards at the time could not do N-key rollover,
| including mine :-)
|
| Subtracting wouldn't work, as more than one combination of
| keys would produce the same 16 bits of signal.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| No, no, I didn't say N, I said two.
|
| If you're holding one key, you have 1 bit set on each bank.
| If you press a second key, you now have an additional row
| bit and/or an additional column bit. You can tell what the
| new key is unambiguously. If it's still one bit on an axis
| then that bit is correct. If it's two bits then the new bit
| is correct.
|
| You only get problems when you have three keys held at the
| same time, or if multiple keys change state simultaneously.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Consider a grid: -+-+-- A | |
| -+-+-- B | | C D
|
| The keys AC and BD pressed simultaneously are
| indistinguishable from BC and AD.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Yes, I mentioned the timing.
|
| But allowing for one key and _then_ a second key before
| you release the first one is a pretty big improvement for
| natural typing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Since it was polling the keyboard, among other tasks, the
| timing of when it looked was not entirely predictable. I
| was pushing the 6802 at its limit.
|
| At least the keys did not need debouncing, they were nice
| keys.
|
| The code listing has disappeared, too.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Ah the memories eh? I had a Digital Group Z80 system with a
| keyboard that encoded the keypress as an 8 bit value that could
| be read by the computer It was 6 bits of key press and one bit
| for shift and one bit for control. I actually know where it is
| though, it's in a computer museum in Germany (long story).
| jbeninger wrote:
| I read a tongue-in-check short story about an elf walking
| through a human museum.
|
| "We think this urn was once used in agricultural ceremonies"
|
| "Bitch, that's my coffee pot!"
|
| Reading comments from older devs sometimes gives me the same
| vibes.
| betterThanTexas wrote:
| Making coffee _is_ an agricultural ceremony!
| cryptonector wrote:
| That keyboard? I used it to kick off my coffee machine
| every morning.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| My wife was looking at the mini REI museum of camping gear
| and her back packing camping stove (a SVEA 123) which she
| still uses, was identical to one of the artifacts on
| display.
| YZF wrote:
| I wanted to make my own joystick for a ZX-81 but at the time
| didn't know enough to decipher the expansion port signals.
| Address/data didn't make any sense to me . At least I didn't
| fry it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Sometimes you only had upper case because the character generator
| was a 5*7 grid which wasn't really good enough to display lc.
| nine_k wrote:
| 5x7 is fine to display both lowercase and uppercase. You could
| even afford some stylistic variations!
|
| Lack of ROM space for lowercase could be a more plausible
| explanation for an early computer.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're probably right. There was a limitation to upper case
| only, I may misremember the cause.
| masswerk wrote:
| Maybe interesting in this context: the CRT font renderers for
| the DEC PDP-1 (notably one of the first commercial machines for
| which a CRT was available) also rendered at 5 x 7 dots. (As bit
| patterns for 35 dots fit perfectly into two 18-bit words, with
| just one bit going unused.)
|
| The first one, there's preserved source code, I would know of,
| was by Ben Gurley (the designer of the PDP-1) and Weldon Clark,
| April 10, 1961. [0] This one featured just upper-case letters,
| figures and the very minimum of special characters. Notably,
| the input devices used featured provisions for upper and lower
| case, hinting at the programmers wanting something workable
| done quickly. Moreover, the character set may not have defined
| fully, yet, since (reportedly) Ed Fredkin, then at BBN (and
| mostly responsible for BBN acquiring the first production
| prototype), was involved in the final definition.
|
| Later, the same year, we also see a fully developed font
| renderer [1], which uses the spare bit in the glyph definition
| to indicate a drop of the entire font matrix, which enables
| drawing lower case characters with descenders. (This convention
| was also used by the later hardware symbol generator Type 33.)
| With this, all characters can be displayed with perfect
| readability (with possible compromises only involving lower-
| case "f".) At the same time, we also see support for the full
| character set, including representations of non-printable
| characters for editing.
|
| [0] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/chargen/pdp1-bbn37-crt.html
|
| [1] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/chargen/pdp1-1961-codeword-
| crt....
|
| [2] Overview with links to related glyph dumps:
| https://masswerk.at/spacewar/chargen/
| kps wrote:
| This article doesn't mention it explicitly, but the Apple II
| used the same character generator IC as the TV Typewriter, the
| Signetics 2513, with its 64-character ROM.
| kristianp wrote:
| What's a good book to read about the early days of Apple? I enjoy
| these stories but this is necessarily skipping a lot of the story
| of the apple I and II. A search brings up "The Little Kingdom" by
| Moritz, but it was published in 1984 so it may include the Mac
| also released in '84 [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
| kristianp wrote:
| There's a folklore.org article about the book:
| https://www.folklore.org/The_Little_Kingdom.html
|
| Edit Looking at the Little Kingdom book, it is about the
| development of the Mac, not the Apple I and II days.
| cancerhacker wrote:
| Woz gets some coverage in Steven Levy's "Hackers: heroes of the
| computer revolution'from 1984, and he updated it in 2014. I try
| to reread it every year or so.
| codazoda wrote:
| I bet Woz's latest book, which I think is iWoz, probably has
| some stories (though it probably covers a later time).
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yes, "The Little Kingdom" is a great book (the very slightly
| updated edition is called "Return to the Little Kingdom" but
| really just adds a short epilogue), and in my opinion (having
| read most of them), the best book on early Apple. It gives you
| more insight into some of the other characters at the early
| company (Mike Markkula and Mike Scott for example) than some of
| the other books. Interestingly, the author, Mike Moritz (a lot
| of Mikes), went on to be a highly successful venture
| capitalist. So he must've had some keen insights about the tech
| industry.
|
| I was a guest on a podcast called "CFO Bookshelf" to discuss
| that book if you want to hear a discussion of it before making
| the commitment to dive in:
|
| https://cfobookshelf.com/return-to-the-little-kingdom/
| TMWNN wrote:
| Quoting myself from the prior discussion (with a correction):
|
| -----------------
|
| Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support
| lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; of its
| major contemporaries, the TRS-80 Model I does not either, despite
| being developed by a major corporation with substantial
| resources. (The Commodore PET 2001 does support lowercase, but
| the keyboard is so terrible that it might as well not.)
|
| He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)--after the II's
| market success was proven--doesn't support lowercase letters.
| Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters,
| the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical
| support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is
| cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically
| use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another
| key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the
| shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of
| a wire to one of the paddle ports.
|
| The lack of support is because the company was working on the
| Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II
| series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase
| support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels.
| Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.
|
| Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III
| would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's
| bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would
| surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support,
| or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it
| were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple
| IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had
| surpassed the II series.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Steve Job's irrational hatred of fans along with his
| micromanagement of literally every square inch of the case
| design didn't help the Apple III with its perennial overheating
| issues. He hastened the demise of the G4 cube for exactly the
| same reasons. My favorite fact about the III is how it became
| an officially-sanctioned troubleshooting technique to pick the
| machine up a few inches off the desk and drop it.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I had a Dragon32 in the early 1980s. This had a (for the time)
| good keyboard, a terrible display, and was only uppercase. I
| bought it because I was interested in the 6809 processor
| (addressing modes gone mad!). But I think some effort between
| Tandy and maybe Dragon (the Dragon was based on the Tandy Color
| computer) things could have worked out better for both.
| bsder wrote:
| > (addressing modes gone mad!)
|
| With good reason. The 6809 was the 6800 with all the idiocies
| cleaned up. And I'm pretty sure that it is still the only 8-bit
| micro with genuinely relocatable/position independent code (aka
| doesn't need a linker pass!)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Late production runs of the Color Computer 2 had the capability
| of doing true lowercase. Not sure if Dragon was still making
| computers by then, but it would have been a simple part swap as
| both VDCs were from Motorola.
| sixothree wrote:
| Really if it wasn't for the ugly colors that computer might
| have had a chance.
| frshOffTheBoat wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
| kragen wrote:
| > _So my TV Terminal, for accessing the ARPAnet, was uppercase
| only._
|
| I never realized that the most influential personal computer was
| specifically designed to access what would later become the
| internet. That's astounding.
|
| (The first internetworking experiments that I can find records of
| were done as part of the ARPANet project, and some of the
| protocols and even many of the port numbers we use today in
| TCP/IP are from ARPANet.)
|
| I also had no idea that Woz had built his own CPU out of discrete
| logic in 01970. I still haven't done that myself 55 years later!
| adastra22 wrote:
| I believe the internet is a direct continuation of ARPANet. It
| just got renamed at some point.
| kragen wrote:
| The ARPAnet (the electronic system) was never an internet (or
| catenet). It predated internetworking, and it was one of the
| networks comprising the internet we are using now
| (specifically, it was 10.0.0.0/8) until its demise in 01990.
| As a social institution, though, you are correct: the
| internet we are using now started out as an experiment inside
| the ARPAnet project.
| pbjtime wrote:
| ...what year are you from?
| bytesandbots wrote:
| The long now foundation
|
| > established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. Our
| work encourages imagination at the timescale of
| civilization
| kragen wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the Long Now
| Foundation, but I endorse the suggestion to read about
| them.
| bregma wrote:
| 01970 is not a valid octal number. Perhaps you meant 0x7B2?
| kragen wrote:
| It is in K&R.
| aantix wrote:
| My first home computer was an Apple 2+. That was 1992 - so it was
| old and dated then, but my parents got it for $150, which was the
| right price range at the time for the family.
|
| Luckily the guy selling included all sorts of manuals with it,
| which helped me to learn programming.
|
| I remember a terminal program I used to connect to local BBSes -
| I would press the forward key and that would inverse the capital
| character display on the screen (white bg, black letter),
| denoting that a capital character was sent, not lower case.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| I actually did a deep dive on this topic for my upcoming project,
| and found this post very enlightening from a bigger picture
| perspective:
|
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28146
| kazinator wrote:
| I had a Apple ][+ clone which had no problem with lower case,
| both display and keyboard. It also featured a numeric keypad.
|
| It was made in Hong-Kong. The ROM announced itself as a "V.S.C.
| 1203".
| Syzygies wrote:
| As a grad student I took out a student loan for the equivalent of
| a year's stipend, to buy an Apple II in 1980. Within a week I
| voided the warranty (?) by carrying out a "shift key
| modification" that involved cutting a trace on the motherboard.
|
| It worked, so I'm a bit baffled by Woz's explanation.
|
| The Apple II didn't really advance my math research (that would
| be the later 128K Macintosh, to which we ported the Macaulay
| computer algebra system), but various friends learned computers
| at my apartment, shaping their later careers. The Apple II
| remains my only computer whose memory layout one could understand
| byte for byte.
| Asraelite wrote:
| In the game LittleBigPlanet you can send digital signals between
| logic gates which are internally 32-bit floats. Because of the
| game's mechanics, the most data you can reasonably store in them
| is 24 bits using just the mantissa.
|
| There's a small community of me and a few other people that like
| to build computers in the game, kind of like the redstone
| computers in Minecraft. The most efficient architecture is a
| 24-bit word size, so it makes sense to split that in 4 and use 6
| bits per character. Because of that, some of the computers in the
| game use the Apple II charset.
| __s wrote:
| The inflation of a 60$ computer costing 333$ matches up with the
| cost of custom ergo keyboards
| gbraad wrote:
| TL;dr
|
| Wozniak had zero checkings, zero savings. Lack of money to spend
| time on a risky rewrite. Jobs didn't see a necessity
| timonoko wrote:
| Keyboard and Display considered superfluous.
|
| When I was released from army 1977, I had learned howto morse and
| howto maintain AK-47, not much else.
|
| Morse came to good use, it was quite possible to communicate with
| the computer with single key and led.
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| I was not expecting a post by Wozniak. I really do enjoy his
| writing style.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-11 23:01 UTC)