Keyboards (in general)

On 21 Nov 2007 at 21:36, Tom Watson wrote: Hmmm, I recall that on my Model 15, it said LTRS. But this was not what we'd think of as a true shift (i.e. "dead" key). It actually sent a code to shift one way or the other. Hence, when sending a message, it was good practice to send LTRS LTRS LTRS just in case one or more instance got lost in the garble. Nothing like trying to read a message that's shifted the wrong way. :) Many of the older terminals lacked lowercase, particularly those early ones used on 6-bit systems. In fact, operator's console displays lacked them (the CDC 6602/6612 didn't, even though it had a graphics mode). But then, most line printers commonly used trains that didn't have lowercase either (large character sets tend to print more slowly). On the other hand, it's much easier to produce an attractive uppercase display on something like an 8x8 grid. Good-looking descenders on coarse displays are very difficult to display passably. Some terminals just printed uppercase in a smaller font to give the idea of lowercase. What the heck, if the ancient Romans could do without them, why do we need them? I've never seen a keypunch that could print, much less punch lowercase without the operator resorting to multiple-punch mode. Cheers, Chuck