Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German.
Sadly it’s too late to change this because doing so would be such a breaking change.
Window* window = new Window(...) String string = “String.com”;> Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German
How would it make anything more awkward?
I like it when such sites have a bug bounty program, or free offers for new users. Free money is nice.
[1]: Capitalisation could have been made purely stylistic, the same way italics are — it’s a helpful hint for the reader, but isn’t expected to convey meaning on its own, therefore, generally can be stripped without loss of information.
I went to a surplus store and bought an EBCDIC keyboard for a couple bucks. I unsoldered all the keys from the circuit board. I took a plastic board, and using the old circuit board, drilled holes in it. Inserted the keys in the holes, and then wired it up in an 8x8 grid pattern. The two 8 bits gave 64 possible keys, which was enough, connecting those to an I/O port enabled recognizing which key was down.
It worked fine as long as you were careful not to press more than one key at a time.
I don't recall what I did with that computer. It's all gone, including the design notebook for it.
Hard to say. I would need to look up component prices for a few years prior to my birth, and it would take me a few minutes to find that archive of 70s Radio Shack catalogs again - though I believe it was actually posted here, so. Of course anyone serious enough to be building an entire computer in those days, brilliant keyboard hack and all, probably wouldn't be sourcing a jellybean part like 1N400x signal diodes one by each...
I had very little money at the time, and scrounged for parts.
Subtracting wouldn't work, as more than one combination of keys would produce the same 16 bits of signal.
If you're holding one key, you have 1 bit set on each bank. If you press a second key, you now have an additional row bit and/or an additional column bit. You can tell what the new key is unambiguously. If it's still one bit on an axis then that bit is correct. If it's two bits then the new bit is correct.
You only get problems when you have three keys held at the same time, or if multiple keys change state simultaneously.
Lack of ROM space for lowercase could be a more plausible explanation for an early computer.
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Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; of its major contemporaries, the TRS-80 Model I does not either, despite being developed by a major corporation with substantial resources. (The Commodore PET 2001 does support lowercase, but the keyboard is so terrible that it might as well not.)
He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.
The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.
Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.
With good reason. The 6809 was the 6800 with all the idiocies cleaned up. And I'm pretty sure that it is still the only 8-bit micro with genuinely relocatable/position independent code (aka doesn't need a linker pass!)
I never realized that the most influential personal computer was specifically designed to access what would later become the internet. That's astounding.
(The first internetworking experiments that I can find records of were done as part of the ARPANet project, and some of the protocols and even many of the port numbers we use today in TCP/IP are from ARPANet.)
I also had no idea that Woz had built his own CPU out of discrete logic in 01970. I still haven't done that myself 55 years later!
dang•4h ago
Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433135 - Sept 2020 (139 comments)