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.
Dylan16807 · 30m ago
Could the code subtract out the previous key for two overlapping key presses, or was it a very strict one at a time?
throwanem · 2m ago
If I had to guess, the sixty or so signal diodes required for an NKRO matrix would have blown the money budget for the project, about like trying to do that kind of work in an interrupt handler would blow the cycle budget for any interesting program.
zabzonk · 43m ago
I had a Dragon32 in the early 1980s. This had a (for the time) good keyboard, a terrible display, and was only uppercase. I bought it because I was interested in the 6809 processor (addressing modes gone mad!). But I think some effort between Tandy and maybe Dragon (the Dragon was based on the Tandy Color computer) things could have worked out better for both.
Mountain_Skies · 3m ago
Late production runs of the Color Computer 2 had the capability of doing true lowercase. Not sure if Dragon was still making computers by then, but it would have been a simple part swap as both VDCs were from Motorola.
bsder · 15m ago
> (addressing modes gone mad!)
With good reason. The 6809 was the 6800 with all the idiocies cleaned up. And I'm pretty sure that it is still the only 8-bit micro with genuinely relocatable/position independent code (aka doesn't need a linker pass!)
kristianp · 59m ago
What's a good book to read about the early days of Apple? I enjoy these stories but this is necessarily skipping a lot of the story of the apple I and II. A search brings up "The Little Kingdom" by Moritz, but it was published in 1984 so it may include the Mac also released in '84 [1].
Quoting myself from the prior discussion (with a correction):
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Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; of its major contemporaries, the TRS-80 Model I does not either, despite being developed by a major corporation with substantial resources. (The Commodore PET 2001 does support lowercase, but the keyboard is so terrible that it might as well not.)
He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.
The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.
Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.
WalterBright · 1h ago
Sometimes you only had upper case because the character generator was a 5*7 grid which wasn't really good enough to display lc.
nine_k · 39m ago
5x7 is fine to display both lowercase and uppercase. You could even afford some stylistic variations!
Lack of ROM space for lowercase could be a more plausible explanation for an early computer.
frshOffTheBoat · 42m ago
Thanks for sharing!
sillystu04 · 1h ago
I wish modern computers considered casing to be purely a matter of style, such that “S” == “s” evaluates to true.
Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German.
Sadly it’s too late to change this because doing so would be such a breaking change.
alpaca128 · 43m ago
But modern computers do that for the most part. Standard search features default to case insensitivity and Windows & Mac OS have a case insensitive file system. But in other contexts it doesn't make sense considering it's part of the grammar.
> Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German
How would it make anything more awkward?
kstrauser · 31m ago
> For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
I like it when such sites have a bug bounty program, or free offers for new users. Free money is nice.
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.
With good reason. The 6809 was the 6800 with all the idiocies cleaned up. And I'm pretty sure that it is still the only 8-bit micro with genuinely relocatable/position independent code (aka doesn't need a linker pass!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433135 - Sept 2020 (139 comments)
-----------------
Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; of its major contemporaries, the TRS-80 Model I does not either, despite being developed by a major corporation with substantial resources. (The Commodore PET 2001 does support lowercase, but the keyboard is so terrible that it might as well not.)
He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.
The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.
Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.
Lack of ROM space for lowercase could be a more plausible explanation for an early computer.
Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.
Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German.
Sadly it’s too late to change this because doing so would be such a breaking change.
> Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German
How would it make anything more awkward?
I like it when such sites have a bug bounty program, or free offers for new users. Free money is nice.