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NO, HERE IS THE REASON WHY:

- THE INTERNET STARTED IN THE 1960'S.

- THE FIRST VIDEO DISPLAY TERMINALS THAT CAME OUT IN THE 70'S DIDN'T SUPPORT LOWERCASE, E.G. THE DEC VT05.

- PHYSICAL TELETYPES AT THE TIME ALSO WEREN'T GUARANTEED TO SUPPORT LOWERCASE, LIKE THE DECWRITER LA05.



Fun trick (I don't know if it still works): on the login prompt of your Linux (or other Unix) machine, type your username in all caps. This sets some strange termios(3) modes, which convert all lowercase output to UPPERCASE and all UPPERCASE input to lowercase. These modes are, AFAIK, for compatibility with these uppercase-only terminals.


Just tried it. Didn’t work.

(I tried it on a regular Linux virtual terminal (as is my normal way—I don’t use a graphical login manager), with my password in correct/inverted/upper/lower case, none work. It’s conceivable a pam module could make it work or something like that. I’m not investigating.)


Is your distribution still using getty?


Arch Linux with no meaningful configuration changes in this area. I understand so.


It's possible they disabled the switch in getty that enables the uppercase detection, it's -U....


You got any more info on that? I can't find anything online that talks about this trick



good luck with multi-case passwords...


Wait. You guys use passwords on your computers??


Fun fact: the earliest versions of the ASCII standard only had encodings for uppercase letters. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#History)


FORTRAN, COBOL and BASIC all used all caps in the 70s when I started to learn programming. People thought I was a nutcase for abandoning cursive in high school!

And don't get me started on punch card programming in college in 1980 :)


Despite ~60 years of updates, the fortran language still isn't case sensitive.


Why were people still using punchcards in the 80s?


Alas, at Princeton University 1980 that was the only way to submit programs. I was doing tech support for professors as part of my work-study package and a couple hours a week on a green-bar paper teletype sorta like this was a huge benefit: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/teletyp...


To make confetti out of the chads for parades. ;)


Huh? In 70s? But first version of Unix in C was written in lowercase.




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