In a recent note, Bruce Black said: > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 12:26:15 -0400 > > > ISNT IT TRUE THAT IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS ONLY UPPER CASE ? > Just in case you are serious: my S/360 green card (undated) shows upper > and lower EBCDIC values. But early 3270s only supported upper case, and > It's worse than that: some earliest models displayed upper case while transmitting lower case to the host. Then, when the price of silicon dropped to where a dual-case character generator ROM could be provided, some terminal vendors concurrently added a keyboard switch so programmers could continue to operate in te treacherous mode if they felt more comfortable living dangerously.
> I vaguely remember that 026 keypunches didn't have lower case either (I > think that came with the 029 keypunch). So us oldtimers rarely saw > lower case in the "good old" days. > As a result, the core I/O system designers waffled on the decision whether to make the file system: o Case insensitive o Case sensitive o Majuscule only, with strict enforcement -- abdicating the decision to developers of applications and other components, and mainly depending on the assumption that no input device would ever supply a mixed-case data set name. As a result: o The core filesystem and its assembler interfaces are case- sensitive. o TSO and many programming languages elected to implement a veneer which gives the appearance of case-insensitivity. o JCL is mostly enforced upper case, as is catalog services, unless the sysadmin flips a switch than makes it case-sensitive. It's haphazard and dreadful. -- gil -- StorageTek INFORMATION made POWERFUL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
