They can now handle lowercase
Wonder how long before Tom Clancy novels change
Brian
How long before the operators break the habit?
Two comments:
Congratulations to the US Navy for joining the rest of us in the 21st Century!
…and…
That is a brilliantly written piece that you linked to. It’s informative, snarky and concise. I give it all ten thumbs up!
The NWS still originates some messages in all caps. The Nat. Hurricane Center is like that. When sent on, Hurricane warnings are apparently poorly converted to mix case (possibly automated?) resulting in some random cruft. Obscure place names in lower case. Words that might be place names in uppercase.
The time lag on switching over on these is amazing. The last all upper case device I saw in a computer lab was a “glass tty” in the mid 70s. And nobody liked to use it even then. (I guess there were some personal computers in the early 80s that were limited at first, but those were essentially first generation devices. Didn’t take long for those to be passed by.)
I wonder if there’s going to be a glut of Naval Model-33 Teletypes hitting the surplus stores soon.
The NWS has to use uppercase because the World Meteorological Organization requires it. They actually want to change it and there have been attempts in the past, but most of their products are still uppercase for whatever reason. I don’t know why my local forecast discussion needs to meet international uppercase requirements, but apparently it does. I think products from the Hurricane Center will end up being uppercase holdouts because their information is useful to other countries, and that may force them to stick to uppercase longer than NWS offices in flyover country.