Re: [open-cobol-list] Upper lower case and free format.

[John Culleton]

On Monday 07 February 2011 09:19:00 Fred Mobach wrote:
> On Monday 07 February 2011 00:34:37 John Culleton wrote:
> > If punch cards had lower case I suspect Grace Hopper would have
> > used U/L when she first designed the language in 1960 or so. But
> > not only punchcards but the interior character set of many 2nd
> > generation computers could not handle lower case. I had charge of
> > a Honeywell system (H110) that did not have lower case in
> > 1970-1971.
>
> Since 1970 I've used punch cards with EBCDIC based computers.
> Sometimes the printers were desinged to print lowercase letters,
> more often not.
>
> However, especially in PICTURE strings lowercase letters were used
> like a -> x'81' (punch 12-0-1 ?).

COBOL was invented circa 1959 or so and was first developed in a world 
where 6 bits were allowed for a character.  As you state printers most 
often had only upper case. and key punches used BCDIC encoding which 
descended from the Hollerith code and only had keys for upper case.  
12-0-1 in a Hollerith card would require overpunching. The standard 
Hollerith encoding had only two holes per column.  Morse code had only 
upper case. And so on. 

Many of the computers used paper tape instead of punch cards for data 
input.  The teletype and similar keyboards again had only upper case 
letters in standard encoding. Remember the telegram? It didn't even 
have punctuation. 

EBCDIC came some years later. But upper and lower case for COBOL code 
came with COBOL 85. COBOL 68 and 74 were upper case only. 

John Culleton
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