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

[François Pinard]

"John W. Baxter" <jwbnews at scandaroon.com> écrit:

> 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).

I saw a few of those, indeed.  Even when raising the speed from 110 to 300
bauds (cardiac people, abstain! :-), these terminals were kind of boring,
as you had to wait a lot for things to happen.  At least, with mechanical
ones, all the big constant noise to give you a feel that _something_
was happening! :-)

> 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.]

If you mean those oscilloscopes which simultaneously drove the X and Y
coordinates, with separate analogic hardware for each character, the only
one I knew were the CDC 6x00 consoles, and these were pretty expensive
pieces of technology.  I do not count the CDC 1700 _huge_ oscilloscope as a
terminal, since it was all graphics, characters drawn were nothing else than
special graphic programs, software this time.  Very expensive, that one...
These devices were, by far, too costly to be ever used as user terminals.

No surprise that raster displays won over them, given that ROMs were at
least less expensive that all that specialised hardware, and especially
the tubes themselves.  Raster technology was far more widespread, because
of television.  ROMs later became cheap.  Nowaday, using oscilloscopes for
glass terminals would just not make any sense, the price could not be right.

At the time of oscilloscopes, by exaggerating only a bit, I could say that
the quantity of hardware was roughly proportional to the number of characters
supported, so nobody could afford the luxury of lower case letters.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard