Post by thread:[OT] CAPITAL LETTERS

Well my first TTY was a model 15 (5 1/2 bit code, don't forget the 1/2 stop bit! ), used it with a home made decoder unit for Ham Radio HF 'digital' communicatio ns. When the 6502 came out the first project was to take output from the model 15 and make perfect morse code. That was hand coded in machine language, before an assembler was available to me. I was chicken and waited for BASIC to arrive before teaching the 6502 to receive morse code and auto-adapt. Re: CAPITALS: Usenet and UUCP email has been around since way before windows, a nd the convention has always been that when you type a word in all capitals you are YELLING, and that it is not polite, and you expect to see such behavior only in a flame when someone has lost it. When you want to *emphasize* something it is polite to surround the something with asterisks. *Regards* Ron Fial ===================================================== At 06:05 PM 7/21/98 PDT, you wrote: {Quote hidden}>>> Perhaps the use of baudot is the problem (5 bit code) :-). > >My first major project after leaving school was to port a newswire reader. >(Some) Newswires in that timeframe (81) used a 6 bit baudot-like code that >provided for upper AND lower case character. > >Hmm. Come to think of it, I think that was the last time I designed HW as >an actual part of my job, too. Had to convert the 6 bit 75bps characters >into 8 bit 300bps characters that could be read by a "real computer." > > :-) >BillW >

I believe that Bulletin Boards created this convention, WAY prior to the existence of UseNet/UUCP (Citadel, the BBS I run, has had a "Bunny Filter" since the beginning ('84 or before? I can look it up.) to force at least ONE char in a post to be lower case - otherwise the BBS will lowercase the entire post, during saving the post to disk <G> Users can lock Caps-Only on display options for themselves if they're on an upper-case only computer/terminal, of course... I've been running my BBS for at least 8-9 years at least now, which is a SCARY thought indeed as it's never made me a penny! (I ought to go look up when I first fired it up, on an XT, sometime! May well have been '86. The board got me acquainted with some neat folks!) It's the convention on BBS'es, or on Citadels at least, that one word can be emphasized by upcasing it, also you can surround a word with -other- characters (*, -, =, +, !, ~ most commonly) - bbs'es have a smaller geographic area & tend to sometimes be more acquaintance-based, or "clique"-ish, or some such (wrong words, tired, know what I mean but can't type it! Sometimes fight-based, the way people can get in digital media...) As here, if the whole sentence is upcased, yelling's "strongly implied"! [I'm afraid MY habits are to interchange -emphasis like this- and like THIS, no insult or yelling intended on my end, just a "Cultural" and a habitual difference - I've been BBSing since the days of ZCPR3, 300 baud accoustical couplers, KSR-33's, and when a system console was a Heathkit (aka griefkit) serial terminal; My mom still has her Z80 machine, probably still works too! My S100 machine ended up a PCBoard drilling machine controller with my brother's co., and ended up destroyed by a fire :-( Drat! Still have the Turbo Pascal 1.0 8" floppy here someplace, sure beat JRT Pascal IMHO!] Styles on BBS'es are pretty individual, too; One lady that calls my BBS refuses to upcase anything at all - she only upcases things when she's being *paid* to upcase them, is her answer when asked (She's a character! Aren't we all, though?) Others use only the hackerish style posting, etc. etc. One nice thing about BBSing is that you get the full attention of the machine you're calling in to (no router problems, usually faster download rates when the 'net is busy) - I supply a few people who have no Internet connection with stuff off the 'net that way. Mark, spam_OUTmwillisTakeThisOuTnwlink.com "*NEVER* dare a Sysop." <VBEG> Ron Fial wrote: > > <snip> > Re: CAPITALS: Usenet and UUCP email has been around since way before windows, and the convention has always been that when you type a word in all capitals yo u are YELLING, and that it is not polite, and you expect to see such behavior on ly in a flame when someone has lost it. When you want to *emphasize* something it is polite to surround the something with asterisks. > > *Regards* > Ron Fial

William Chops Westfield wrote: > > >> Perhaps the use of baudot is the problem (5 bit code) :-). > > My first major project after leaving school was to port a newswire reader. > (Some) Newswires in that timeframe (81) used a 6 bit baudot-like code that > provided for upper AND lower case character. > > Hmm. Come to think of it, I think that was the last time I designed HW as > an actual part of my job, too. Had to convert the 6 bit 75bps characters > into 8 bit 300bps characters that could be read by a "real computer." Hey I had the same job, isn't that low speed TTS? I still have the specs around here somewhere. AP was using the same services up until around 1987. Strange to see a 1918 Underwood typewriter jury-rigged to support current loop running 28 something baud. That was also the last time I worked on hardware professionally, for some reason I went into the network market. Of course I didn't do as well as you did. I still play with the PICs to keep my hardware senses working. -- Neil Cherry http://home.att.net/~ncherry .....ncherryKILLspam@spam@worldnet.att.net

Hmmm! Are you saying that the real function of Internet e-mail, is for us to send primal screams of rage to other people, internationally? Dunno, does it actually help people when they do that? (I didn't ask, "do people DO that habitually", but rather, "does it -actually help- them to do it" <VBG>) How's this for scary: Using some Early BBS'es: you'd call the sysop, they'd manually connect the (sometimes home-made, 110 baud) accoustical coupler (sometimes after chatting with you voice for 15 minutes <G>), and then you sat there watching the blazing speed of 110 baud or later a whopping 300 baud, on either a TV screen terminal or a KSR-33... Bored me to tears at times. I didn't do much except on mainframes off direct terminals, I'm a fast reader! The earliest "BBS'" were just a term package, so you could do file transfers via telephone instead of sneakernet. Ever heard someone who's learned to whistle their logon string loud enough & well enough that it pierced the shell of the accoustical coupler as noise, & logged them onto their favorite BBS? (Scary man <G>) CrT (Cynbe ru Taren) started Cit in December 1981, as a room/hallway alternative to other BBSs boards. CrT submitted his code to CUG in January 1982, releasing it to the public domain. I'd have to look up the exact dates, an IBM version of Citadel certainly wasn't done until 89 or so? (GremCit, a CP/M Citadel and a precursor to mine, started in there sometime after '83, and there certainly was other previous BBS software, on varied machines. There are many pieces of BBS software out there!) I can all too clearly remember downloading ZCPR3 source at 300 baud from a BBS on an accoustical coupler on my & my brother's S100 machine, to floppy disks, AC powered & spinning constantly (DUMB design flaw, that!) - I sold (my half interest in) the CP/M machine to him in '82? Nice hardware mods we had in there (64k Ram, 32k EPRom copied to what's now called "Shadow RAM" at boot time, it was a BUNCH of 4k by 1 bit RAM chips at about $30 each, then you could run Patch to fix the EPRom bugs, we didn't have an EPRom burner as we spent all our money on RAM!) I am not perfect on dates. (This could be parallel development, for all I know - or care!) The important thing here IMHO is to understand that there are some minor - yet significant - habit variations, with good intent, on some peoples' part; One upcased word doesn't a shout make! To me, the *important* thing is that I know very well that the Internet isn't even -called- by some BBS folks, they don't have 'net access - for whatever reason, visual disabilities, dyslexia, physical disabilities, or just plain being too poor to feed their kids -and- pay $20 a month for a net connection - I download stuff for some of them, fairly often, and pass it through my laptop or my BBS - as they eventually DO (I hope!) come on to the 'net, they'll bring their "bad" habits that they've been posting to BBS'es with for years, with them - and they mean well, despite their different habits (for the most part at least!). {And some of them are pretty FEISTY! <G>} Let's please not get people "trained to assume" that one uppercase word means that it's time to flame someone, is what I'm asking for here - I would hope that that's a pretty reasonable position on my part. There's enough flaming, negative garbage, & non-helpful BS in the world as it is, we don't need to participate in it or teach it - and I don't like to let it be advocated without challenging it. All flame wars prove is that people can disagree - we all learned THAT, in kindergarten! Another thing we all know is that some days are -terrible-, those days where "the bed got up on the wrong side of us & stayed there" <G>, and any of us could snap at someone else on one of those days - taking that personally isn't going to help, arguing about how evil someone who had a bad day today or yesterday, is, isn't going to help, etc. And we've all seen that pretty often. Mark Willis, .....mwillisKILLspam.....nwlink.com Ron Fial wrote: > > At 10:51 PM 7/21/98 -0700, you wrote: > >I believe that Bulletin Boards created this convention, WAY prior to > >the existence of UseNet/UUCP (Citadel, the BBS I run, has had a "Bunny > > Mark, EraseMEmwillisspam_OUTTakeThisOuTnwlink.com > > WAY? *Not*. UseNet (newsgroups) started in 1979, but uucp mail transfer star ted in 1976. The original version 2 protocol released by Mike Lesk,David A. Nov itz, and Greg Chesson of AT&T is still in use, but today most people use the new er ('83) BNU version. I was using uucp back in 1977 on the Reed College PDP-11/ 70 running UNIX, and there was lots of email just between the 1500 accounts on t hat single machine. Now I believe that was before any microcomputer based BBSs s tarted up, and people were already YELLING :) > Regards, > Ron Fial