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A comment on Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead of lower case?. Parent comment

Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by mschuster91 on Thursday December 14, 2023 @04:22PM (#38647429)
> The Navy didn't actually do away with all-caps until 2013.

And aviation still is full with it. For better or, in my opinion, worse... but aviation is so stuck of outdated and inconsistent crap in general...

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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by jacobr1 on Thursday December 14, 2023 @06:34PM (#38648967)
Airbus did an interesting job reinventing aviation typefaces, including handling ALL CAPS scenarios explicitly: https://b612-font.com/
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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by throw0101b on Thursday December 14, 2023 @08:20PM (#38649918)
Most recently discussed three months ago:

* 466 points, 94 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517567

From 2019:

* 429 points, 154 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=b612-font.com

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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by wakeforce on Thursday December 14, 2023 @11:35PM (#38651024)
This is the nicest monospace font I've seen in ages!
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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by Zecc on Friday December 15, 2023 @04:55AM (#38652631)
Hard disagree.

The header image on the website shows slashed zeroes, but the font preview doesn't, which is unexpected. In fact when previewing in Google Fonts there's barely any visual distinction between uppercase letter O and zero. There's only a very slight difference in width which you actually have to look for. Punctuation isn't centered in their box and leaves so much tailing space the test text `5240N 15:01 .84 8,9` reads like `5240N 15: 01 . 84 8, 9`

These problems don't exist as much in the variable width font, where there is no tailing space in the punctuation and the uppercase Os are rounder.

There's also some weird pinching in the corners of N. 1, l and I are perfectly distinguishable though, so at least it's got that going for it.

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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by nemo on Friday December 15, 2023 @10:46AM (#38655261)
Letter O vs zero is really bad indeed. Also the parentheses characters are very poorly done - far too similar to the square bracket characters.
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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by yencabulator on Saturday December 16, 2023 @11:39AM (#38665532)
The hollow zero vs slashed or dotted zero thing is often done in fonts with an extra variant; basically the font can contain both and will display what the application requests. So you should assume that the font really does have the slashed zero, but the font viewer you looked at it with didn't ask for it.

For web, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...

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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by Zecc on Saturday December 16, 2023 @07:29PM (#38669210)
That's a good point. I added that rule (font-variant-numeric: slashed-zero;) to the font preview using the browser's devtools, and I saw no difference.
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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by flukus on Thursday December 14, 2023 @11:10PM (#38650902)
Flight booking systems still seem to be stuck with it, even newer fields like email are always in all caps.
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Re:Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead o... by mkesper on Friday December 15, 2023 @06:49AM (#38653186)
Probably because it's a CICS program written in Cobol running on a mainframe.
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