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NGS Recovery Form


Ernmark

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..just wondering - has anyone ever typed in the description info normally (both UPPER & lower case) & submitted (accidentally or on purpose) & found whether it rejects/accepts/changes the text ? I know it "corrects" the PID to upper case at the top of the fom. I've always diligently switched back & forth to caps lock, but wondered what would happen if a lower case slipped thru....hmmmm.

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The all-CAPS is left over from two factors in earlier hardware. The original keypunches (for those paper cards) and teletypes (used for input on some machines) didn't have any lower case characters. And the printers had such poor resolution that the all-caps helped readability. With modern hardware this seems to me to be a case of "we've always done it that way".

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..gosh - I remember those keypunches! I had a COBOL course once in college (disclaimer - I was REALLY young at the time...and the machines were replaced a year or 2 later) & remember having a program go into a 'loop' when one of the cards got bent & the reader stopped - it was really 'fun' watching the monitor as your program (identified of course by your last name) started using up the mainframe's resources until it was reset...

 

..end of flashback..

 

Thanks for the info - I won't worry about messing up the Caps anymore and will direct all efforts to spelling & clarity :D

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Bill93,

I think the reason keypunches didn't have upper case was because the punch cards would not have allowed enough codes (holes) to encode both upper and lower case, but I don't have any punch cards handy so I can't verify that. Also, data entry was just that back then--heads down data entry, and those in charge most likely saw no reason to bother with upper and lower case. In there minds it would have slowed down entry and served no purpose. Just being able to computerize that data was enough. Let's not go crazy!

 

Another reason printing upper and lower case would have been troublesome is physical limitations on the printers. Many early printers were band or chain printers, where a spinning band with the letters stamped or cast on it spun past the paper and small hammers hit the appropriate letter as is passed the spot where it was to be printed. Having more letters available for printing would complicate, and even worse, slow down that process.

 

Finally, upper and lower case letters are coded differently in computers (using what is called ASCII code)--lower case "a" is represented by "97" and upper case "A" by "65". While our human brains can easily determine that they are the same letter, computers had no such idea, and sorting data purely by the coded values means that upper case would be before lower case, so the list aardvard, Allen, Ball would sort as Allen, Ball, aardvark (upper case "B" is value "66"). Definitely not the way we want things sorted. Once the computer world acknowledged the existence of lower case letter, but before Unix and Linux (yeah, yeah, and then Windows) allowed the easy conversion of strings to different cases and the recognition of letters as the same value no matter what the case, sorting required an interermediate step to convert the letters to one case. Ahh, the days of batch programming!

 

I suspect one more reason things are still done in all uppercase is that it removes the need to think about what needs capitalization and what doesn't. So much easier, if lazy.

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Most of our work is on the AS400 now with a S/36 partition on it so it still looks and acts like the S36. We do still however have a bunch of the actual 36's sitting around here that we do development and testing on. We have a machine in almost every county office (USDA/FSA) and a handful of them are still using the original S36 as well.

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Hey watch it............ I'm still programming in COBOL on a IBM system 36!

 

We are a dying breed <_<

Glad to see someone else is still COBOLing. I'm still using COBOL on several VAXx (and anything else that comes along). If anyone needs COBOL programming, I'm the one people are coming to! Of course COBOL and VAX is another combination that is disappearing fast.

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