Re:Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
by wtallis on Saturday March 30, 2019 @09:05PM
(#19533036)
That Wikipedia page you linked to explains that small caps are used almost exclusively to emphasize or distinguish text from text set using the usual mix of uppercase and lowercase letters. So pointing out that small caps are a well-established typographical practice does nothing to explain what TI was thinking by including small caps but not lowercase. And no matter how innocuous you consider it, it is clear that the decision strikes many users as odd, and that it comes across as something of an unattractive technological limitation, akin to the then-recent systems that only supported uppercase.
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It's slightly complicated, but the smaller caps of "small caps" are the lower case. As Wikipedia says, setting text in small caps is "technically not a case-transformation". In those days it would not be surprising that a system would only have one font.
I don't know about the Silent 700's font, but it looks to me like this probably wasn't a mistaken case of the DRY principle: after all, the TI-99's lower case letters are still stored as separate bitmaps (they are reproduced in an image here: http://electrickeet.com/line-itfont.html).
So it is clear, at least, that they had the storage for lower case, and for whatever reason decided to go with a small caps font. It isn't a result of a simple limitation that they hacked around by scaling bitmaps or something like that. I wouldn't like to speculate about what fraction of users found it odd at the time.