[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a 
> miss.

MS-DOS understood lowercase: it just didn't care in the common way.  Did filenames have case at all? I can't remember.  Interestingly, other than minority systems (Unix!) the modern standard for filenames seems to be to remember but not care about case: this is what the Mac does (with the default FS options) and I am pretty sure what Windows does too.  I've been bitten several times by Mac things which fail horribly because there's a README and a ReadMe in a tarball.

Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always?  I suspect it didn't officially, until Fortran 90, although obviously many F77 compilers accepted lowercase.  More to the point for quite a long time, whether or not the system would accept lowercase, people actually *wrote* un uppercase and caps lock was probably useful for that.  Also COBOL I suspect, and probably SQL?  There was a lot of code written in those languages.

--tim