[TUHS] terminal - just for fun
Dave Horsfall
dave at horsfall.org
Sun Aug 3 16:47:07 AEST 2014
On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> 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.
ISTR that the mighty 1403 printer had the "text train" - type TN, if
memory serves. It slowed down printing (not as many duplications) but you
got lower case and a few more symbols. You quickly learned to never leave
a cup of coffee on the lid, because it lifted automatically...
> 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 ).
I had a boss once who had this annoying habit of writing "(\ blah\ )" in
his Nroff documents.
-- Dave
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