On Aug 1, 2014, at 10:13 AM, Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote: With a keyboard that has the CTRL key in the location where $DEITY intended it to be. - MV

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote: Hehe. ;) Really? Aside from the extra keys and a couple being in different locations I can't imagine anyone having too many issues! -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, Mary Ann Horton wrote: Personally I've yet to think of a single use for Caps Lock and Num Lock. Whenever I get stuck with a M$ keyboard (which seems to be most of them) I prise off a few irritating keys so that I don't hit the poxy things by mistake. Best keyboard I ever used was the PC-101, with the runner-up being the one with the function keys down the LHS. Can't remember the Sun keyboards, but they did have some pretty ghastly ones, such as the first one; it was so heavy that you could've used it as a lethal weapon. -- Dave

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, John Cowan wrote: Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a miss. -- Dave

On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 4:27:50 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote: Only in the sense that all file names were upper case, and lower case names were upshifted. No. It was first implemented on the IBM 704, which had a 6 bit BCD character set. No lower case. Basically, until the introduction of ASCII, there weren't many systems with lower case. IBM had lower case characters with EBCDIC, but didn't seem to use them. I wrote code in FORTRAN and COBOL before the introduction of lower-case, but later compilers I've seen for both languages accepted lower case. I think the real reason for the retention of upper case in these languages was because it made people feel leet. "We're computer programmers, we write in upper case". It's like the disregard for normal punctuation that some style guides require( like putting spaces on the wrong sides of parentheses, or omitting them where required ). Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

Tim Bradshaw scripsit: As I said, it allows you to adjust to a mismatch: a keyboard that types lower case by default, software that rejects lower case. "Do you know the saying, Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel?" I haven't, and suspect that Estraven made it up; it has his stamp. --Le Guin, _The Left Hand of Darkness_ Lisp, too, is a family quarrel. Scheme is even more so than Common Lisp; CL is a language, but Scheme is a family of languages, perhaps 80 of them. The minimalist R5RS standard of 1998 was case-folding, like all standards before it, but perhaps half of all implementations ignored this and were case-sensitive. In practice, case-folding implementations folded to lower case, and where case was not folded, the standard identifiers were lower case. The latter position is a feature of the case-sensitive R6RS (2007) and R7RS-small (2013) standards. At present, case-sensitivity dominates in the 40+ implementations that I use for test purposes by about two to one. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org After fixing the Y2K bug in an application: WELCOME TO <censored> DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900

Remember that writing programs on terminals was a relative latecomer -- FORTRAN was designed for punched cards. Their 6-bit character set has "numbers" and "letters" (no case need apply). The printers and other supporting peripherals printed capital letters, probably because you could get legibility with fewer dots that way and didn't have to worry about descenders. At Bell Labs (before Unix days) programmers wrote their programs on coding sheets and handed them in to a room full of keypunchers. They would punch the program up on cards, and then a second person would repeat the process using a verifier, a piece of hardware that took in a punched card, and had a keyboard, and would verify that what the person typed in was what had been punched on the card. Then the punched and verified deck of cards was returned to the programmer, who could submit it to the mainframe to run it. Although the coding sheet had little tick marks to indicate the column positions, the keypunchers took advantage of FORTRAN syntax to simply ignore spaces (they did know enough to respect blanks in Hollerith strings and to start typing the program in the appropriate column). Leaving the blanks out not only made the process go faster, but also reduced the number of false failures in verification, where the original keypuncher and verifier disagreed on how many spaces should be inserted. The model 33 Teletypes that were the most common terminal attached to Unix in the early days had only a single case, as I recall, being primarily used with paper tape with a character set closely related to the character set used on punched cards (although with some features that eventually become supported in ASCII). Unix, however, interpreted the "letters" in the character set as lower case by default, which was highly unusual at that time, since there were almost no printers or terminals that would print upper and lower case.

Tim Newsham scripsit: Hah! Unix had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Unicode age. Microsoft and Apple were well ahead on internationalization and mostly still are. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Winter: MIT, / Keio, INRIA, / Issue lots of Drafts. So much more to understand! / Might simplicity return? (A "tanka", or extended haiku)

On Aug 4, 2014, at 2:10 PM, Tim Newsham &lt;tim.newsham(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: LINUX? surely you jest... or your fingers have a mind of their own. -- Milo Velimirović Network Specialist - ITS Network Services 608.785.6618 Office - 608.386.2817 Cell University of Wisconsin - La Crosse La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA 43 48 48 N 91 13 53 W

scj(a)yaccman.com scripsit: According to legend, Teletype's own legibility studies showed the opposite, that all lower case was far more legible in the presence poor light, a weak ribbon, dirty paper, and other noise sourcess, but this was overridden by management on the grounds that it would make it impossible to spell "God" correctly. Untrue, but amusing. The model 33 was released in 1963 and was one of the first devices to use (the 1963 version of) ASCII. System/360 was originally supposed to use it, but the effort to make ASCII-compatible printers and card readers in time for its release was a failure. The Unix treatment of LF as newline shows, however, that you folks had model 37 TTYs; the model 33 still required CR+LF for newline. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.

arnold(a)skeeve.com scripsit: That shows that they did have Model 33s, as was confirmed for me in private mail. At first there were only a few Model 37s, but they did exist; after nroff, they became more common. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. --The Hobbit

On Aug 4, 2014, at 20:04, scj(a)yaccman.com wrote: I vaguely remember the DEC LA 30(?) we had as a console to the 11/45. It would only print Upper Case. Related to this is the stty -lcase option that mapped lower case char to upper (or the other way around, I forgot) jaap

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Tim Bradshaw wrote: One of my irritations was "Makefile" and "makefile"; I could never remember which had priority. I standardised on "Makefile", but oddly enough "makefile" was/is popular; I prefer my metafiles to stand out. -- Dave

On 1 August 2014 23:27, Tim Bradshaw &lt;tfb(a)tfeb.org&gt; wrote (in part): As a side note, I run OS X on a case-sensitive fs and had only one bother when an installation script had mixed case. N.

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: Now you're taking me back to the 2741 and ye olde 360/50... The Teletype on the PDP-8 was upper-case, as was the 2741 with the APL goofball. I never saw a Terminet. -- Dave

Dave Horsfall &lt;dave(a)horsfall.org&gt; wrote: CapsLock has its use, it's just that on a typical PC keyboard the key is unnecessarily large and easy to reach. But it's simple enough to swap it with -say- Esc. I've been doing just that on X11, Linux console and OpenBSD console. See: X11: xmodmap(1); Linux: loadkeys(1), keymaps(5); OpenBSD: wsconsctl(8) -- Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/ Homepage: http://devio.us/~ndr/

Warner Losh &lt;imp(a)bsdimp.com&gt; wrote: To each their own. As a Vi user, nothing beats having Esc on the home row. -- Gopherhole: gopher://retro-net.org/1/dnied/ Homepage: http://devio.us/~ndr/