I’m not aware of any computer character set with upper and lower case but no punctuation other than a period. That would make no sense. The only upper-case-only character set I know of with only a period for (normal) punctuation was DEC’s RAD50, which wasn’t used for normal text files or communication but only in filenames and other very limited contexts like assembly language source code. So, no, having them trying to type to each other using RAD50-magically-with-lower-case is nonsense.
Maybe I’m not quite explaining myself here. I said that early large computers (early mainframes and early minicomputers) only had upper-case and then, once large computers had (mostly) grown the ability to handle lower-case, the first couple generations of microcomputers came out with no ability to handle lower-case.
(If it sounds like character sets were a massive unholy mess from the 1950s through well into the 1980s, that’s only because they were. Things improved as the more divergent architectures began to die off, and now Unicode provides the first real hope of a good character encoding standard.)
Indeed. This just reeks of an art project made by an artist who had little knowledge of computer history.
No, I understood you fine. I was just insinuating on the reason, probably incorrectly. Do you know why they didn’t use lowercase? Was it to save bandwidth or processing speed by using a smaller character set?
This is anecdotal so probably won’t explain the reason that was the case for other computers of the day, but my old TRS-80 Color Computer lacked lowercase only because the character generator was unable to display it. The computer itself used and understood the full ASCII character set, but the character generator’s ROM could only store the “bitmaps”, if you will, for 64 characters. Since uppercase letters, punctuation, etc. require no descenders, I guess it was just a matter of memory economy to toss out the lowercase ones.
The CoCo did display lowercase, in a sense, by inverting the color (e.g. “A” would be black on green, “a” would be green on black). This required no extra ROM space, just flipping a bit somewhere to change the pallette.
In the early mainframes and minicomputers, it was because they had to fit as much text as possible into as little storage as possible and one way to save space was to only allocate six bits per character, which doesn’t give you enough distinct numbers to have upper and lower case at the same time.
(Why six bits? Because machine words were commonly 36 bits on early-ish mainframes, and 6 goes into 36 an even six times. Why 36-bit machine words? Because that’s how big a word needs to be to encode ten decimal digits, which was desirable if you want a mainframe to be able to replace adding machines. Ten is because we have ten fingers, by and large. The first few examples of the later minicomputers had word sizes of 18 or 12 bits to be compatible with mainframes.)
Early microcomputers didn’t have lower case for the reason mentioned: To save a little money per computer by allowing the character set to fit into a smaller ROM. After the very first examples, which hooked up to teletypes, microcomputers mostly worked by painting graphics on a TV screen. To convert text into something they could feed their RF modulator and ship out to the TV, they had ROMs that essentially said “Character 65 is ‘A’, which has pixels at these locations: …”. Kind of a built-in typeface, really, and you can save money doing that in two ways: Having a really crappy typeface, which they did, and not having any characters you could possibly do without, which means lowercase gets cut.