How common was use of lower case alphabetic characters on console printer?

[Carl Claunch]

The 1130 typeball places capital versions of the alphabet on both sides, displaying the large letter regardless of case. I found an almost perfect typeball, the only deviation from the 1130 is that it produces lower case un-capitalized letters. An ebay auction for a type ball listed it only as type 952, no font name, with the picture appearing to match the BCD layout of the 1130 ball. I found it has all the 1130 characters in exactly the right places to match the tilt/rotate codes that are issued with the XIO, which is very handy for my 1130 replica with its leveraged Memory Typewriter mechanism as a console. 

Any idea how common or uncommon it was to issue the lower case version of letters? The judicious use of both cases can avoid having to shift the typewriter between UC and LC, saving the 60-70 milliseconds per shift, but the keyboard produces hollerith code, only upper case letters. Keypunches generated only upper case versions unless explicitly multipunched with the EBCDIC for lc versions. It would seem that most users would create the strings for typewriter output using methods that produced only upper case. On the other hand, it isn't that hard to add DC directives with the lower case codes.

 Any idea how much lower case alpha might have been embedded in DMS2, utilities, library routines, etc? Just curious for now. 

Carl

[Tom Watson]

The 1130 had the translate tables setup to always print the "upper case"
side of the typeball. Unfortunately the APL typeball had the alphabet
on the "lower case" side of the typeball.

I did some work and altered the system conversion table (it was a few
MODIF things as I remember) to print the alphabet as "lower case" which
allowed for the APL typeball to be used. As I recall there were more
more characters that weren't in the right places, but diddling with the
translate tables did the trick.

The problem I had was that the other users who had different 2315 packs
didn't get the proper alterations that would have allowed me to use the
APL typeball for DMS-2 as well as APL.

This is all from memory of over 40 years, so I may have details off a
bit.

On another bit, I did re-do the Fortran 'TYPEZ' routine to buffer
things. It made the programs run while the typeing took place. I also
worked on the keyboard part, and did some busy loops tests to do the
echo part. It made the typing quicker on the keyboard interrupts as an
unsuspecting fellow user noticed. You could only do busy loops INSIDE
the interrupt. Thankfully the keyboard (029) and the console writer
both were on IRQ-4.

So much for memories.

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