14 Sep
1998
14 Sep
'98
4:48 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.
14 Sep
14 Sep
5:03 p.m.
On Mon, 14 Sep 1998 CLASSICCMP(a)timaxp.trailing-edge.com wrote:
Except what's the purpose of the hardware
lowercase modification if
the first thing you do with it in software is convert to uppercase? :-)
It hooked the command interpreter, not the low-level input routines. It
would only uppercase commands (and I assume it was smart enough to leave
quoted strings alone). Applications would, of course, have mixed case
input available.
-- Doug
7:20 p.m.
On Mon, 14 Sep 1998 CLASSICCMP(a)timaxp.trailing-edge.com wrote:
Except what's the purpose of the hardware
lowercase modification if
the first thing you do with it in software is convert to uppercase? :-)
If you're in a word processor, sure. But when you're typing commands, you
don't want to have to worry what case you're in. The point of converting
it in software is that you don't want to have the commands stored in a
table in memory in both upper and lower case, wasting memory.
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!
I preferred that in my early days as well. Then moved on to Apple Pie.
Then was impressed by AppleWorks and made the switch, occasionally using
Apple Pie for certain tasks.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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