I agree with Hal Kaplan about the the [IBM]keypunch machines and the terminals not supporting lower case - the early VDU's (2260's) actually had their character sets hard wired (iirc 8x5 wire frames with small ferrite rings at the intersections where you wanted a dot). Unix's use of case is a little strange because it always seemed to me that it was designed for I/O using teletypes (most other[serial] devices emulated tty's) - and tty's (at least early ones) used 5-bit Baudot code which did not have lowercase (it actually used Shift chars for numerics, and I think some people supported lowercase using either binary zero or two letter-Shifts as lowercase shift).
btw I remeber devising a document compression algorithm for IBM masm that used 5-bit encoding with a set of single/ double-character shift sequences that allowed single character encoding of pre-defined or dynamically calculated strings of arbitrary length (pre-defined would be common words &c. - dynamic would be based on frequency analysis of the source). Of course it was universally recognised in those days that you couldn't patent an idea, algorithm or computer program <g> Andrew Davies MBCS CITP - AndyD 8-)# ********************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. Please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] with any queries. ********************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
