4 Aug
2014
4 Aug
'14
8:28 p.m.
scj(a)yaccman.com scripsit:
capital letters, probably because you could
get legibility with fewer dots that way and didn't have to worry about
descenders.
According to legend, Teletype's own legibility studies showed the
opposite, that all lower case was far more legible in the presence poor
light, a weak ribbon, dirty paper, and other noise sourcess, but this was
overridden by management on the grounds that it would make it impossible
to spell "God" correctly. Untrue, but amusing.
The model 33 Teletypes that were the most common
terminal attached to Unix
in the early days had only a single case, as I recall, being primarily
used with paper tape with a character set closely related to the character
set used on punched cards (although with some features that eventually
become supported in ASCII).
The model 33 was released in 1963 and was one of the first devices to use
(the 1963 version of) ASCII. System/360 was originally supposed to use
it, but the effort to make ASCII-compatible printers and card readers
in time for its release was a failure.
The Unix treatment of LF as newline shows, however, that you folks had
model 37 TTYs; the model 33 still required CR+LF for newline.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies!
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.