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Comment by Zecc | Hacker News Reader

This is about the .net TLD and has nothing to do with .NET the framework.

It doesn't take long to realize this, it's even outright obvious considering ICANN is involved, but still... It seems weird to me that they would write .NET and .COM rather than .net and .com even if DNS is case-insensitive.

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Using all caps goes back to the very first RFCs, so they probably stick to that for historical reasons even if the modern convention is lowercase.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc920#page-2

I think in the past, internet signals were much weaker so EVERYONE HAD TO YELL to get their message through. Either that or 1-bits were in short supply.

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 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?

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

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...

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.

good luck with multi-case passwords...

Wait. You guys use passwords on your computers??

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

http://man.he.net/man8/getty

getty -U

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

After over 20 years of ambiguity, I don't think I'd honestly have the energy to worry about this if I were the person at ICANN deciding the headlines; it could have easily been avoided had the .NET framework just picked a less confusing name.

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