from Hacker News

Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead of lower case?

by SeenNotHeard on 12/14/23, 5:44 PM with 149 comments

• by 0xNotMyAccount on 12/14/23, 6:58 PM

  It's a holdover from the days of Morse code. Recall the first computers were for military problems, and the first output was teletype. Teletype was originally for military messaging and that had a long history of using all caps because they relied on manual transcription of Morse code (and other codes) over wire and radio. The all-caps policies were put in place to make sure the officers could consistently read what the operator had transcribed. Some of these date back to the 1850s. The Navy didn't actually do away with all-caps until 2013.

  https://www.al.com/wire/2013/06/navy_puts_all_caps_communica...

  https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=489...

• by crazygringo on 12/14/23, 7:33 PM

  Distilling all the explanations, the answer is simple.

  When you're limited to one case, all-uppercase has a long history and we're used to reading everything from headlines and titles to telegrams and stone inscriptions in uppercase. It's natural, we're used to it, and uppercase came first historically anyways.

  Whereas all-lowercase isn't really a thing historically. You see some trendy logos or ads that use all-lowercase, but that's a pretty new thing. (Well, and then maybe back to e.e. Cummings for poetic effect?)

  At the end of the day, it's frequent to encounter text in all-caps, it's rare to encounter it in all-lowercase. So that's why.

• by jamal-kumar on 12/14/23, 6:29 PM

  It's also interesting to note how many of these systems are still running on a daily basis for 50+ years now. Stuff like your airplane boarding passes and hotel bookings still use all-upper encoding because these systems go back to the 1960s [1]. Cheques and other bank documents still use those MICR typefaces, which are similarly still encoded in all-caps [2]

  [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...

  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...

• by mannyv on 12/14/23, 6:53 PM

  One benefit to uppercase: is that an ell or a one?

  Upper case letters are more easily distinguishable, especially on low-res devices (like the old CRTs).

• by mynameisnoone on 12/15/23, 12:26 AM

  DATE: 14 DEC 2023

  SUBJECT: UPPER CASE

  SALUTATIONS:

  PERHAPS EVERY SYSTEM SELLER ASPIRED TO BUSINESS AND CAPABILITY SIGNALS WITH FORMALITY AND AUTHORITARIANISM LIKE "WE BEGIN BOMBING IN FIVE MINUTES". HOW WEAK AND TIMID WOULD IT APPEAR IN LOWER CASE? THAT IS THE REASON. IT DEFINITELY WAS NOT THE FACT THAT MOST 50'S AND 60'S SYSTEMS LACKED LOWER CASE, SO THERE WAS ONLY ONE CASE. OR THAT EARLY OCR NEEDED TO USE AN ALPHABET AS DISTINGUISHABLE AS POSSIBLE.

  ARGUE WITH ME, BUT I THINK AFTER LOWER CASE BECAME A THING, WE FORGOT AND LEFT CAPS LOCK ON SO WE COULD SHOUT LIKE GRANDPA WHO FORGOT TO CHANGE HIS HEARING AID BATTERIES RATHER THAN IT WAS TOO MUCH EFFORT TO HOLD SHIFT ON KEYBOARDS AND SCREENS.

  BUT WORRY NOT YOUNGSTERS, IN 50 YEARS, WE WILL BE WRITING IN STREET GRAFFITI EMOJI SLANG WITHOUT SPACES OR PUNCTUATION.

  SINCERELY,

  SOME RANDO GUY ON THE INTERNET

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intelligent_Machi...

• by drfuchs on 12/14/23, 6:15 PM

  Initially because teletypes only had uppercase, and those were the only tty devices available. And then when early CRT terminals became available, RAM was expensive, and you could save a whole chip by not storing one more bit per screen character.

• by aldousd666 on 12/14/23, 6:22 PM

  It's because they couldn't easily draw letters below the line. It was all block-aligned. They used blitted bits from a lookup table and copied them into squares on the screen that did not vary from letter to letter

• by toast0 on 12/14/23, 6:59 PM

  > Then Why is Unix Lower Case?

  It used to be, at least on some systems, if you logged in with an upper case user name, the system assumed you only did upper case, and all future output would be in upper case. In this case, Unix is in lower case, because you told it you could handle it.

• by kazinator on 12/14/23, 7:11 PM

  Also, in Japan, some old equipment displays only katakana. No hiragana, let alone kanji. E.g. old cash registers and such.

  I have a Yamaha FX-500 (audio effects processor) from 1989 (original owner!) which is like this: in the program titles, shown on the small LCD screen, you can use Roman letters, numbers and punctuation and also Katakana.

  I modded that thing about a decade ago, replacing the NVRAM chip with a small daughterboard with a batteryless chip; and replaced some RC4558 op-amps with NE5532.

  You can see pictures from the batteryless mod here:

  https://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20131110.004036.5ed12...

  I had to put a transistor onto the little board in order to invert one signal.

  That was all made possible by suddenly getting the schematics for the FX500 thing in my hands, so I knew exactly what the original part is and all its signaling and how to relate it to the batteryless AutoStore chip.

  I found the schematic on a Hungarian website called Elektrotanya, which at the time you could only join if you passed a small electronics knowledge test.

  In one of the images you can see a diode (nestled under the socket for the IC). This is part of the transistor circuit, which features a Baker clamp to speed it up.

• by coliveira on 12/14/23, 6:27 PM

  In the beginning, encoding was done just for single letters, not for a combination of lower an upper case letters (it was an evolution that later lead to the creation of ASCII code set). This had to do with limited amount of storage in early computers, and the fact that people had to use punch cards to enter data. Upper case is preferred because it is more legible and the standard form of letters in the western world.

• by flohofwoe on 12/14/23, 8:11 PM

  At least on home computers connected to crappy TVs via composite or coax, uppercase characters are almost certainly more readable than lower case characters just because uppercase characters use more pixels of an 8x8 pixel matrix.

  Also uppercase was also standard on Eastern European computers, and I doubt they cared whether they could spell GOD all uppercase ;)

• by kelnos on 12/14/23, 8:18 PM

  I think it's kinda weird that a lot of the toplevel comments here are offering (incomplete and sometimes incorrect) answers to the question, clearly without having read the highest-rated answer after following the link. That answer is much more comprehensive and goes into the history of typesetting and even writing.

• by btilly on 12/14/23, 8:13 PM

  If someone could comment on https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28146, the comment by Solomon Slow is almost right.

  The detailed history can be found in https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/unix-linux-history. In short, Unix was initially developed as an experiment in operating system design. But the investment of buying a PDP-11 to port it to was justified on the promise of creating a typesetting system for patent applications. And so it needed both upper and lower case early in its history. Since most English text is lower case, that was a sensible default to use.

• by paulorlando on 12/14/23, 7:49 PM

  Good responses here already, but it's interesting to note that the early typewriters had the same issue. The noisy Remington No 1 was released in 1874, with all caps and no lower case. The shift key allowing both upper and lower case wasn't introduced until the Remington Model 2 in 1878.

• by FerretFred on 12/14/23, 6:13 PM

  Those of us who had to endure CGA and EGA screens will understand. For me, legibility was all-important.

• by MarkusWandel on 12/14/23, 7:41 PM

  This may have been answered already. Character sets are a continuous evolution from Morse code (which didn't have a notion of "case" or even punctuation), to the first, or at least early teletypes, which used 5-bit Baudot that didn't have upper/lowercase either.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

  Eventually, lowercase capable terminals came along and the more interesting question is, where did the cultural shift to "lowercase by default" actually come from? Unix? Very early Unix stuff was all caps because that's all they had, but eventually lowercase prevailed.

• by wduquette on 12/14/23, 7:23 PM

  The earliest terminal and printer I used that supported lower case, supported lower case "without true descenders", i.e., the lower case letters had to fit in the same character cell as the upper case letters. Lower case "g", for example, was shifted up, which looked funny. Needless to say, we felt really modern and high class when we got hardware that supported "true descenders". (And of course all this was a built-in monospace font; font support was years in the future.)

• by gumby on 12/15/23, 4:01 AM

  The large SO reply missed a beat: unix was case-sensitive/lowercase preferred because Multics was. As far as I know, Multics was the first to be case sensitive. It had the advantage of being developed after ASCII had been defined, and by standardising on 7-bit ASCII. Other 36-bit machines of the era used multiple character sets, including SIXBIT, a six-bit character set with only one case, to pack an extra character in a word.

• by kens on 12/14/23, 6:50 PM

  The retrocomputing question mentions the theory that upper case was selected because it would be disrespectful to put "God" in lower case. I remember reading that explanation decades ago on alt.folklore.computers, so the story has been around for a long time: groups.google.com/g/comp.misc/c/vVW0wrfLaKw/m/tr-MsouDL5YJ

  The opposite question is interesting; is there anything historically that is lowercase-only?

• by 3cats-in-a-coat on 12/14/23, 7:09 PM

  Think of situations in which a font has a single case. Like say on calculator-like displays which have additional elements to show letters. You could see those on old VCRs for example:

  https://i.imgur.com/aloDSQh.jpg

  Notice they're uppercase.

  Now imagine this display but with lowercase letters:

  1. In most letters the top half of the letter display is not used, but in some it is.

  2. In some letters like "q y g j" you need a "descender" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descender), which means you need to extend the display further down, and add more elements.

  3. Digits themselves are "capital only". There are no "small case" digits in most fonts, or in writing. Which makes capitals consistent with them.

  So capital letters are simpler, more visually consistent and as a result also I'd say more legible on displays where there's not a ton of text to begin with.

  Even on pixel displays where the "descender" or "unused top half" is not a technical problem, you still would need larger spacing between lines to fit the descender without some letters touching the line below.

  Capital-only is also the optimal choice when you need to print some small label on a device, or on a street sign, for example. It's a "STOP" sign, not a "stop" sign. No one does "small letters only" labels. It's either capitals only, or mixed case.

  TLDR: Capital letters FTW.

• by simne on 12/15/23, 12:13 AM

  That's easy. Now people used to high quality displays, even cheap now are good.

  But this was not always. First videomonitors was very moderate quality, with huge distortions, and they even wear out (yes, OLED wear out is not new problem for industry). Only later, appear professional monitors, and after looong time, near all monitors become digital, and high quality and long life.

  And UPPER case is much more readable on moderate quality monitor. That's all.

• by vincent-manis on 12/14/23, 6:48 PM

  The mainframe system I used in the 1970s had its printers with upper-case print trains. They did have one printer with an upper/lower train, so if you wanted to print a document out you submitted a batch job specifying that printer, and waited longer than usual for your output (because the print speed was lower). The computer centre management of the time considered document formatting to be an inferior use of their shiny equipment.

• by K0balt on 12/14/23, 8:23 PM

  Teletypes. Many early computer systems were connected to teletypes as terminals.

  I cut my my teeth playing SUMER and programming Fortran on a VAX over an all caps teletype with an attached paper-tape punch/reader and on a good day I got to use one of the decwriters (a dot matrix printer-terminal.

  The vector screens (Tektronic?) were always in use by the engineering students, and I was just an 8 year old logging in on my moms account lol.

• by pfdietz on 12/14/23, 6:50 PM

  This is why in Common Lisp the internal names of symbols are normally (including all symbols in the standard) all in upper case. The default reader converts lower and upper case characters in symbols to upper case, and the default printer prints them in lower case (if no escaping is required), so you can write a program in lower case.

• by dredmorbius on 12/15/23, 2:09 AM

  The "God" justification for all-upper-case is one I've heard attributed to Ken Olsen, CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, though I can't seem to find a reference at present.

  The widespread adoption of upper-case text in computers and electronic communications would of course have long pre-dated either Olsen or DEC.

• by baking on 12/14/23, 7:56 PM

  Line printers. We couldn't use mixed cases until dot matrix or daisy wheel printers came along.

  If the question is why upper case instead of lower case, there is a long tradition of handwritten uppercase only labels in drafting and mechanical drawing when precision is required.

• by JdeBP on 12/14/23, 7:14 PM

  I think that it's a bit of a reach there to blame 3rd century Latin for why computer/telegraphy people 16/17 centuries later decided to not retain the idea of lower case, when by that point it had been around in writing since the 10th century.

• by anonymousiam on 12/14/23, 7:25 PM

  My first terminal was a Lear Siegler ADM 1A and it did not do lower case. https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_ADM-1

  The Teletype ASR-33, which was one of the most common "consoles" for early computers, also did not do lower case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33

  So the answer to the article's question is: The hardware of the day did not support it.

• by vintermann on 12/14/23, 6:57 PM

  I've wondered if we went wrong with Unicode and trying to put every symbol mankind has ever invented on par with the Latin letters.

  Now I wonder if we went wrong allowing mixed case.

• by sonicanatidae on 12/14/23, 6:52 PM

  I worked in hospitals and healthcare for a majority of my IT career.

  Clinical staff LOVE CAPS LOCK.

  To this day, I was never given an answer that made sense.

• by JohnFen on 12/14/23, 11:17 PM

  Upper case is more legible. Simple as that.

• by hyperhello on 12/14/23, 6:20 PM

  Older computers put the text in a grid, and uppercase letters are designed to be read monospaced.

• by jacquesm on 12/15/23, 2:06 AM

  Because in the days of telex the message mattered, not the style.

• by SergeAx on 12/16/23, 6:59 AM

  One simply cannot write abbreviations in all lower case.

• by CodeWriter23 on 12/14/23, 10:28 PM

  We were used to yelling at our computers a lot more back then

• by teddyh on 12/14/23, 7:41 PM

  According to legend (which I read somewhere), upper case was chosen because “Otherwise it would be impossible to spell the Deity correctly.”

• by qingcharles on 12/14/23, 7:40 PM

  For some infuriating reason, in 2023, all the police reports I see are still primarily written ALL IN UPPER CASE AND EVERY POLICE OFFICER OR CORRECTIONAL OFFICER HAS TO HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY BEFORE THEY WRITE THEIR REPORT. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY THIS IS AND WHEN I ASK THEM THEY SAY THAT'S THE WAY THEY HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT AND THAT IS THE WAY THEY WERE TOLD TO DO IT.

• by anononaut on 12/14/23, 10:07 PM

  LOWER CASE IS BLOAT.

• by jollyllama on 12/14/23, 7:18 PM

  Sovereign Citizens have entered the chat.

• by chasil on 12/14/23, 6:13 PM

  Because they didn't implement the entire ASCII set?

  Case in point would be Apple integer BASIC.

  https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...

• by adrianmsmith on 12/14/23, 6:25 PM

  The computers my mother worked with (1960s?) only had 6 bits per character. So with 2^6 = 64 different characters, there weren't enough characters to have both upper case (26 chars) and lower case (26 chars) plus all the numbers (10 chars) and symbols etc. you'd need. So they only had upper case.

  I think it sort of stuck from there, that computers and commands etc. used upper case.