Character set

ASCII

https://www.ascii-code.com/ https://www.ascii-code.com/timeline

Early IBM computers did not support lower case letters and the names of versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were usually spelled in all-uppercase (FORTRAN 77 was the last version in which the Fortran character set included only uppercase letters. The official language standards for Fortran have referred to the language as "Fortran" with initial caps since Fortran 90. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Naming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_BASIC

No support for lowercase letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC

Through several early models of the Apple II, Applesoft BASIC did not support the use of lowercase letters in programs, except in strings.

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple-ii-didnt-support-lowercase-letters

[Editor’s Note: I recently asked Steve Wozniak via email about why the original Apple II did not support lowercase letters. I could have guessed the answer, but it’s always good to hear the reason straight from the source. Woz’s response was so long and detailed that I asked him if I could publish the whole thing on VC&G. He said yes, so here we are. –Benj] So, in the end, the basic reason for no lowercase on the Apple I and Apple II was my own lack of money. Zero checking. Zero savings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#Apple_I_character_set Apple 1 Character set contained uppercase characters, numbers and basic punctuation and math symbols.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

0x @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O

1x P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _

2x ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /

3x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, uppercase-only text on the screen (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20h to 5Fh), with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor or on a regular TV set (by way of a separate RF modulator).

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/23802/when-did-assembly-source-code-begin-to-be-written-in-lowercase

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-FORTRAN-and-COBOL-use-capital-letter-for-the-commands-which-is-so-hard-to-read https://www.quora.com/When-was-it-common-for-personal-computers-to-only-recognize-all-caps

Personal computers came along somewhat later (beginning in the 1970s) but had the same early constraints of cost and available memory as did early mainframes. The first generation of personal computers (including Commodore and Apple II) accordingly had restricted character sets with only upper case letters. But with the advent of the IBM PC (early 1980s) and Macintosh (mid 1980s) their designs included full 8-bit bytes, based on their Intel and Motorola processors, respectively, allowing full access to upper and lower case alphabets.

Lowercase letters were added to computers in 1967, forming the US-ASCII character set

First, the term ASCII is overloaded, and that leads to confusion. 7-bit ASCII only includes 128 characters (00-7F or 0-127 in decimal). 7-bit ASCII is also sometimes referred to as US-ASCII. UTF-8 encoding uses the same encoding as 7-bit ASCII for its first 128 characters. So a text file that only contains characters from that range of the first 128 characters will be identical at a byte level whether encoded with UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11303405/force-encode-from-us-ascii-to-utf-8-iconv#:~:text=First%2C%20the%20term%20ASCII%20is,referred%20to%20as%20US%2DASCII. https://theasciicode.com.ar/ascii-printable-characters/lowercase-letter-a-minuscule-ascii-code-97.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ascii.7.html https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23637266/why-all-command-in-bash-are-in-lowercase https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html#tag_12_02 https://ethw.org/ASCII

Unicode

https://home.unicode.org/ https://home.unicode.org/about-unicode/

Unicode was released 1991
Java was first popular programming language to support unicode from ground up 1995
Perl added support later in 1998

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1416215/which-programming-languages-were-designed-with-unicode-support-from-the-beginnin https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/402915/what-was-the-first-language-to-allow-unicode-in-function-names

Keyboard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_keyboard Replacing early punched cards and paper tape technology, interaction via teleprinter-style keyboards have been the main input method for computers since the 1970s, supplemented by the computer mouse since the 1980s.

Multiple layouts It is possible to install multiple keyboard layouts within an operating system and switch between them, either through features implemented within the OS, or through an external application. Microsoft Windows,[33] Linux,[34] and Mac[35] provide support to add keyboard layouts and choose from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_keyboard#Physical_injury