[Ffmpeg-devel] [Ss][Nn][Oo][Ww] spelling^wbranding

[Gary Corcoran]

Erik Slagter wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 13:17 -0400, Gary Corcoran wrote:
> 
> 
>>ROM ?  There was no ROM !!  There were only solid metal characters
>>that struck an ink ribbon to produce the characters on the paper.  So
>>no, it would NOT have been an easy thing to add lowercase characters.
>>It was amazing that they could more-or-less reliably mechanically
>>print characters at 10 per second that way.  :)  
> 
> 
> Oh dear, hardcopy terminals. I must have erased that from memory on
> purpose ;-)

;-)

> I wonder in what year CRT terminals were introduced (and why we're still
> stuck with CAPITALS).

I recall that when I was at Berkeley in 1980 (where Bill Joy was also a
graduate student at the time), the ADM-3A CRT terminals (one of the earliest,
if not the first, commercial CRT terminal), were relatively new.
Oh, look here:  http://www.tentacle.franken.de/adm3a/
It says they were introduced around 1977, and it mentions Bill Joy using
one for developing the original version of 'vi'. :)  And, as I thought,
they were originally only uppercase, but there was an optional ROM that
could enable lowercase.  I'm sure it was a matter of cost that lowercase
wasn't standard...

Gary