On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 11:44 AM, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 5, 2017, at 10:46, Clem Cole wrote:
> Except as noted, alphabetic strings may be represented in any combination
> of upper and lower case. The only syntactic units which requires
> preservation of case information are:
>
> - local-part, except "Postmaster"

So... the username portion.

so the "postmaster" (username) does not preserve case by this rule.

It had to work that way, because CDC machines in particular in those days had very funky character sets (lots of them actually). IBM's were not much better. Remember, IBM was the primary driver behind ASCII (the System 360 was supposed to be IBM's first ASCII system).

Upper and Lower were very much a luxury because bits were expensive. Not just in registers, but main memory, registers, disk storage.

I think it's hard for modern users to really understand the extremes that programmers had in those days because so much was done to encode things in small numeric codes. This was just another example if it.

The 8-bit 'byte' is only so because Fred Brooks, kept throwing Gene Amdahl out of office during the 360 project. Gene thought anything over 6 bits was a waste. Fred said if it was not a power of 2 don't come back, he could not program with it.

Clem