Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[John W. Baxter]

In article <oqzopjs5h7.fsf at titan.progiciels-bpi.ca>, François Pinard 
<pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> "John W. Baxter" <jwbnews at scandaroon.com> writes:
> 
> > 8.  Francois:  "Why Scheme adopted case insensitivity is a mystery to 
> > me."
> 
> > My guess is, as with domain names, timing, and the difficulty of 
> > writing
> > lower case on KSR-33 Teletypes and upper-case-only glass teletypes.
> 
> KSR-33 Teletypes?  I am not sure if we really think the same thing, but 
> your
> are referring to those machine guns working at 110 bauds?  Those 
> engineering
> wonders made up from the assembly 2500 distinct _mechanical_ pieces!?
> With the paper tape reader/puncher option?  I'm not sure such really 
> abound
> nowadays.  I once believed that Scheme was invented for the homo sapiens. 
> :-)

No..the ones with reader/punches were ASR-33.  ;-)

"Keyboard send/receive; Automatic send/receive"

Those are the ones...and they were followed with "glass teletypes" which 
were also uppercase only (and of course some expensive ones which 
weren't).  And then the character-only displays went away (leading to 
increasingly silly graphical effects and finally to ads on web pages).

For that matter, it looked for a while as if the "raceway" terminals 
would win out over the bitmapped (via a character-generator ROM).  [In 
raceway, the beam traced out a pattern over each character position, 
with the beam turned on and painting non-background in those portions of 
the raceway pattern which would make the desired character.]

>From Teletype, lower case showed up in the KSR-35 and ASR-35.

  --John (who also dealt with the Model 28 Teletypes (or were they Model 
18s?) specialized for weather bureau use...symbols, not letters...and 
who dutifully trooped up to MIT's weather RADAR room with Prof Wurtele 
to try to "see" Sputnik...<the calculations said we couldn't, but not so 
definitively that it wasn't worth trying...and we didn't >.)

[There were also machines like the TX-0, where the CPU had the job of 
painting white or not painting white at each and every bit position on 
the screen, for each and every refresh cycle.]

-- 
John W. Baxter   Port Ludlow, WA USA  jwbnews at scandaroon.com