14 Sep
1998
14 Sep
'98
1:48 p.m.
You're making some of it up. DOS intercepted the
command line input and
only parsed out DOS commands. If it didn't recognize a DOS command it
passed the line off to BASIC. His DOS enhancement COULD have converted
any lowercase command line to uppercase before passing it on to BASIC so
it wouldn't puke.
That's the way I interpreted his description of the action.
That's entirely doable and would be rather elegant.
Except what's the purpose of the hardware lowercase modification if
the first thing you do with it in software is convert to uppercase? :-)
The only software that I extensively used on a Apple II that dealt with
lowercase characters was Paul Lutus's _Applewriter II_. A very excellent
editor, with what amounts to almost "regular expression" search and
replace. If only EMACS (Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping?
Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift?) were as lean and mean!
Tim.