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Re:Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters by dirkt on Thursday September 10, 2020 @01:20PM (#24434429)
Don't forget that the Apple I was basically a glorified video terminal, so the text mode came first. Also in the Apple II. That's the reason there are 7 pixels horizontally per character.

The graphics mode is just a juiced up text mode, so the 7 pixels were kept.

And for the video shift register, it's no difference if the input comes from the character ROM, or video RAM.

Re:Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters by thought_alarm on Thursday September 10, 2020 @01:38PM (#24434654)
That's another thing I've wondered about. Did the Apple I also output 7 pixels per character? Since it doesn't do color and doesn't care about the color burst frequency, it's free to use any size of pixel it wants. With a 5x7 font, I would have guessed that 6 pixels per char would be simpler.