[Ffmpeg-devel] [Ss][Nn][Oo][Ww] spelling^wbranding

[Erik Slagter]

On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 22:02 +0200, Fran?ois Revol wrote:
> > Fran?ois Revol wrote:
> > >>On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 07:57:17PM +0200, Erik Slagter wrote:
> > >>
> > >>>On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 09:00 -0600, Mike Melanson wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>>>Sorry for bothering, but is there an official spelling or not?  
> > >>>>>Or is it
> > >>>>>just "I don't care, follow your own preference.", which is also 
> > >>>>>fine.
> > >>>>
> > >>>>	Conventionally, FOURCCs from AVI files are uppercase. I would 
> > >>>>vote for 
> > >>>>SNOW (and that is the current FOURCC).
> > >>>
> > >>>Aarrrgggg, capitals are ugly! Also they tend to be favoured by 
> > > > > ugly
> > >>>operating systems and applications (= because they are archaic).
> > >>
> > >>Anyone know the reason why legacy systems used all caps? It's 
> > > > really
> > >>funny..
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Because primitive terminals only had caps.
> > 
> > 	That's not very creative. I think a better theory is that ALL CAPS 
> > was 
> > a de facto standard foisted on us by Microsoft. Apple came out with a 
> > computer that could do lowercase but MS asserted that their customers 
> > did not want or need lowercase. At least, not until MS supported 
> > lowercase. Naturally, Unix had supported lowercase since the dawn of 
> > time but was also the subject of much patent wrangling.
> > 
> > 	Is that closer to the answer you were looking for, Felker?

LOL ;-)

> Lol, that would be funny but it was before the whole M$ thing really :P
> teletypes and friends... :)

What really puzzles me is that those "caps-only" terminals probably
already where using ASCII (yeah, caps ;-)). This means that inputting
lower-case characters only needed a shift/caps key on the keyboard. For
output, 26 extra entries in character generator rom would be necessary.
I can hardly believe that was taking that much space it wouldn't fit in
the rom.

OTOH my first home computer, a Sinclair ZX81 (aka Timex 1000 iirc), had
a more or less valid reason to only support caps; it had it's complete
(basic) symbol table in it's character table (which also wasn't ASCII of
course) so it didn't have enough space left for lower and upper case
letters).

Then there is the thing that both MS and DEC (!!!) used all-caps output
to apparently tell us the that case is insignificant. This had the
side-effect that people started to actually create filenames in upper
case (and some still do, some people even have the caps lock on all day
for this purpose, no comment), so this decision was ehrm... suboptimal
imho.