←back to thread

Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2020)

(www.vintagecomputing.com)
136 points colinbartlett | 4 comments | 10 May 25 21:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.474s | source
1. zabzonk ◴[10 May 25 23:35 UTC] No.43949917[source]▶
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.
replies(3): >>43950062 #>>43950130 #>>43950236 #
2. bsder ◴[11 May 25 00:03 UTC] No.43950062[source]▶
> (addressing modes gone mad!)

With good reason. The 6809 was the 6800 with all the idiocies cleaned up. And I'm pretty sure that it is still the only 8-bit micro with genuinely relocatable/position independent code (aka doesn't need a linker pass!)

3. Mountain_Skies ◴[11 May 25 00:15 UTC] No.43950130[source]▶
Late production runs of the Color Computer 2 had the capability of doing true lowercase. Not sure if Dragon was still making computers by then, but it would have been a simple part swap as both VDCs were from Motorola.
4. sixothree ◴[11 May 25 00:37 UTC] No.43950236[source]▶
Really if it wasn’t for the ugly colors that computer might have had a chance.