[TUHS] lowercase vs. uppercase PDP-7? (was Re: Recovered /etc/passwd files)

reed at reedmedia.net reed at reedmedia.net
Sat Oct 5 07:58:53 AEST 2019


On Fri, 4 Oct 2019, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:

> no, it was tty model 33.

Changing the topic slightly ...

The scans for v0 code are in lowercase. I assume printed on TTY 37.
But why is the early PDP-7 code in lowercase?

I do see the B language code for "lcase" which converts to lowercase. 
Maybe something like that was used?

(I think I saw a scan mistake showing a "B" which is probably an "8" due 
to that. See pdp7-unix/src/cmd/bc.s "dab B i".)

I didn't see anything in historical login code or manuals about
upper versus lowercase.

Any experiences about upper versus lower case to share?
When did stuff get rewritten to have both cases in code?

Jeremy C. Reed

echo Ohl zl obbx uggc://errqzrqvn.arg/obbxf/csfrafr/ | \
 tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"


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