[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Warner Losh]

On Aug 1, 2014, at 9:27 PM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:

> 
> 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 tar ball.

MS-DOS was strictly upper case  (with lower case converted) until Win95 expanded the lengths and case restrictions (but case was preserved, but not significant). Mac followed the same convention, although today it depends on the filesystem options for case being significant or not (for some programs it matters, strangely enough).

> 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.

FORTRAN III and IV compilers for the PDP-11 RSX-11 / RSTS-E / RT-11 system accepted lowercase, but in the LST files it produced it always converted to upper case. But the terminals of the time had sensible caps locks keys that weren’t directly to the left of the ‘a’ key… and the few that did had the control key to the left of it rather than relegated to its “modern” place below the shift key...

Warner

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