> “The original Apple II did not support lowercase letters which is kind of surprising to most people,” Hertzfeld tells Inverse, laughing. “But the designer, Wozniak, made a trade-off that blinking characters were more important than lowercase letters.”
Herzfeld is mistaken: Wozniak himself says the lack of lowercase had a completely different reason:
So, in the end, the basic reason for no lowercase on the Apple I and Apple II was my own lack of money. Zero checking. Zero savings.
I was sure the blinking cursor was a staple of the mainframe folks' terminals years, maybe decades before Apple came on the scene, but I looked up some YouTube videos and the DEC VT52 (released 1974-1975) seems to have not had a blinking cursor. Its successor, the iconic VT100 did have a blinking cursor, but wasn't released until 1978.
Maybe later I'll do more research and look up other old terminal models, but I'm going to stop for now.
Also, I guess Apple is a little older than I thought; I always pictured the ubiquitous Apple IIe as a 1980's machine (and I saw some in the wild well into the 1990's). Seeing they were released in the 1970's is pretty interesting.
> “The original Apple II did not support lowercase letters which is kind of surprising to most people,” Hertzfeld tells Inverse, laughing. “But the designer, Wozniak, made a trade-off that blinking characters were more important than lowercase letters.”
Herzfeld is mistaken: Wozniak himself says the lack of lowercase had a completely different reason:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...The headline is completely wrong, there was no bug fixed. The blinking cursor was an invention, not a bugfix.
I was sure the blinking cursor was a staple of the mainframe folks' terminals years, maybe decades before Apple came on the scene, but I looked up some YouTube videos and the DEC VT52 (released 1974-1975) seems to have not had a blinking cursor. Its successor, the iconic VT100 did have a blinking cursor, but wasn't released until 1978.
Maybe later I'll do more research and look up other old terminal models, but I'm going to stop for now.
Also, I guess Apple is a little older than I thought; I always pictured the ubiquitous Apple IIe as a 1980's machine (and I saw some in the wild well into the 1990's). Seeing they were released in the 1970's is pretty interesting.
Utterly buries the lede. The actual content that explains where the blinking cursor comes from is ~1 paragraph.