Cafe quote tonight

[mattlistener]

Me: "My first word processor was on a Commodore 64. It didn't have fonts."

Jay: "My first word processor was on a Trash-80. It didn't have lower-case letters!"

Comments

[beowabbit]

(Not that it matters, but just for accuracy, I didn’t refer to it as a Trash-80.)

<geeky geekiness="85%">
The current music on your post refers to the fact that the other person we were chatting with said you could get lowercase on an Apple II (maybe IIgs?) with a special chip. You could actually get lowercase on a TRS-80, too. Not with a special chip, but by cutting a lead on the video controller (called a “character generator” in those days). The character generator used in the TRS-80 could display punctuation and capital letters and *either* 64 block graphics characters *or* lowercase letters. The engineers at Radio Shack voted for block graphics, but there were instructions in one of the TRS-80 magazines for modifying your TRS-80 to do lowercase (and if you still wanted graphics software to be usable, for installing a physical switch on the keyboard so you could switch between lowercase and graphics). It’s an early case mod, but functional! Ah, those were the days!

(I much preferred the Commodore PET’s approach, where you could switch between graphics and lowercase in software, by POKE’ing a certain memory location with a special value. But the computer lab only had two PETs, and only one of them had an adequate keyboard.) </geeky>

[zzbottom.livejournal.com]

The geek equivalent of whipping them out and measuring them with rulers. *laugh*

[zmook.livejournal.com]

Nothing says "I salute you" like Paulo's LJ icon.