Back in 1978, I made my own keyboard for a single board 6800 computer I designed, also because I could not afford a keyboard.<p>I went to a surplus store and bought an EBCDIC keyboard for a couple bucks. I unsoldered all the keys from the circuit board. I took a plastic board, and using the old circuit board, drilled holes in it. Inserted the keys in the holes, and then wired it up in an 8x8 grid pattern. The two 8 bits gave 64 possible keys, which was enough, connecting those to an I/O port enabled recognizing which key was down.<p>It worked fine as long as you were careful not to press more than one key at a time.<p>I don't recall what I did with that computer. It's all gone, including the design notebook for it.
As a grad student I took out a student loan for the equivalent of a year's stipend, to buy an Apple II in 1980. Within a week I voided the warranty (?) by carrying out a "shift key modification" that involved cutting a trace on the motherboard.<p>It worked, so I'm a bit baffled by Woz's explanation.<p>The Apple II didn't really advance my math research (that would be the later 128K Macintosh, to which we ported the Macaulay computer algebra system), but various friends learned computers at my apartment, shaping their later careers. The Apple II remains my only computer whose memory layout one could understand byte for byte.
My first home computer was an Apple 2+. That was 1992 - so it was old and dated then, but my parents got it for $150, which was the right price range at the time for the family.<p>Luckily the guy selling included all sorts of manuals with it, which helped me to learn programming.<p>I remember a terminal program I used to connect to local BBSes - I would press the forward key and that would inverse the capital character display on the screen (white bg, black letter), denoting that a capital character was sent, not lower case.
Discussed at the time (of the article):<p><i>Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433135">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433135</a> - Sept 2020 (139 comments)
> <i>So my TV Terminal, for accessing the ARPAnet, was uppercase only.</i><p>I never realized that the most influential personal computer was specifically designed to access what would later become the internet. That's astounding.<p>(The first internetworking experiments that I can find records of were done as part of the ARPANet project, and some of the protocols and even many of the port numbers we use today in TCP/IP are from ARPANet.)<p>I also had no idea that Woz had built his own CPU out of discrete logic in 01970. I still haven't done that myself 55 years later!
I had a Dragon32 in the early 1980s. This had a (for the time) good keyboard, a terrible display, and was only uppercase. I bought it because I was interested in the 6809 processor (addressing modes gone mad!). But I think some effort between Tandy and maybe Dragon (the Dragon was based on the Tandy Color computer) things could have worked out better for both.
I actually did a deep dive on this topic for my upcoming project, and found this post very enlightening from a bigger picture perspective:<p><a href="https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28146" rel="nofollow">https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28146</a>
In the game LittleBigPlanet you can send digital signals between logic gates which are internally 32-bit floats. Because of the game's mechanics, the most data you can reasonably store in them is 24 bits using just the mantissa.<p>There's a small community of me and a few other people that like to build computers in the game, kind of like the redstone computers in Minecraft. The most efficient architecture is a 24-bit word size, so it makes sense to split that in 4 and use 6 bits per character. Because of that, some of the computers in the game use the Apple II charset.
I had a Apple ][+ clone which had no problem with lower case, both display and keyboard. It also featured a numeric keypad.<p>It was made in Hong-Kong. The ROM announced itself as a "V.S.C. 1203".
What's a good book to read about the early days of Apple? I enjoy these stories but this is necessarily skipping a lot of the story of the apple I and II. A search brings up "The Little Kingdom" by Moritz, but it was published in 1984 so it may include the Mac also released in '84 [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K</a>
Keyboard and Display considered superfluous.<p>When I was released from army 1977, I had learned howto morse and howto maintain AK-47, not much else.<p>Morse came to good use, it was quite possible to communicate with the computer with single key and led.
Quoting myself from the prior discussion (with a correction):<p>-----------------<p>Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; of its major contemporaries, the TRS-80 Model I does not either, despite being developed by a major corporation with substantial resources. (The Commodore PET 2001 does support lowercase, but the keyboard is so terrible that it might as well not.)<p>He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.<p>The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.<p>Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.
I wish modern computers considered casing to be purely a matter of style, such that “S” == “s” evaluates to true.<p>Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.<p>Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German.<p>Sadly it’s too late to change this because doing so would be such a breaking change.