[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)]

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