On Mon, Feb 24, 2014, at 03:44 PM, John McKown wrote: OS/360 went the opposite > way, to upper case, likely because the original peripherals were mainly > upper case only. It's cheaper to design and build a mono-case device. At > least it was in the past.
AFAIK none of the "OS/360" peripherals were upper case only. Keypunching lower case required an overpunch, but the EBCDIC character set has lower case, the card readers and punches (including the unit old record stuff) could read and write lower case. Some printers had an upper case only type train as an option, but you could swap it for an upper+lower case train if you wanted to print lower case. The console devices were typewriter based and supported lower case. Tapes and disks read and wrote lower case just fine. There were a few speciality devices attached to 360 systems, like PARS terminals. It's possible that some of them did not support lower case input and/or display, but the "standard" 360 devices did. -- Tom Thackrey [email protected]
