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

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136 points colinbartlett | 1 comments | 10 May 25 21:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.285s | source
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WalterBright ◴[10 May 25 22:48 UTC] No.43949649[source]▶
Back in 1978, I made my own keyboard for a single board 6800 computer I designed, also because I could not afford a keyboard.

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.

It worked fine as long as you were careful not to press more than one key at a time.

I don't recall what I did with that computer. It's all gone, including the design notebook for it.

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YZF ◴[11 May 25 05:10 UTC] No.43951581[source]▶
I wanted to make my own joystick for a ZX-81 but at the time didn't know enough to decipher the expansion port signals. Address/data didn't make any sense to me . At least I didn't fry it.
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1. ralferoo ◴[12 May 25 15:52 UTC] No.43964401[source]▶
Back in the mid 80s, I'd killed several joysticks playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon on my Amstrad CPC (which was more-or-less a standard Atari pinout apart from 2 select lines and 2 fire buttons). By chance, my parents had a push-button phone that was being scrapped because it wasn't very good for some reason that I've forgotten. I reverse-engineered the PCB and figured out that 2,4,6,8 and # would all be individually detectable if I cut a couple of traces on the PCB and I soldered and old joystick cable to the where the original edge connector on the keypad board used to be. That was aged around 10. I suspect I still have it somewhere, nearly 40 years later, as I was still using it with my Amiga when I packed that away when I went to university.