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\u201ci\u2019m willing to<\/strong> believe that [using lowercase] is more deliberately aestheticized among young women on tumblr,\u201d says adam aleksic, an internet linguist who goes by etymologynerd, \u201cbut none<\/em> of the mega online communities use regular punctuation.\u201d he and i are talking at a swanky coffee shop in soho, where he\u2019s finishing up research on why the r-word is making a comeback<\/a>.<\/p>\n to make his point, etymologynerd pulls up 4chan on his phone and starts scrolling. among the rancid all-lowercase musings, i notice a plethora of greater-than signs, angle brackets, and asterisks. because 4chan doesn\u2019t support\u2014has never supported\u2014rich text (italicization, bolding, etc.), users also employ text-markup conventions: *yes* for yes<\/strong>, \/i\/hell no\/i\/ as hell no<\/em>, etc.<\/p>\n while many may contend that writing in lowercase is a callback to one\u2019s youth, sites like 4chan remind us that, at least within the digital sphere, the callback goes back much further and is part of a larger tradition. \u201clower case? it started with single-case tty model 33. now, it is habit,\u201d ken thompson writes, in lowercase, in an email where he politely declines my request for an interview. (notice how thompson spells lower case<\/em> as two words instead of one. before lowercase was a cornerstone of identity politics, it was just a lower case of the alphabet.)<\/p>\n ken thompson is 83 years old and, of course, one of the computer scientists to whom we owe the existence of the internet. he\u2019s referring, in his email, to the teletype model 33, a popular terminal used for telecommunications that debuted in 1963. back in the \u201950s, computers functioned on terminals that could support only 64 unique characters that\u2014counting numbers, punctuation, and special characters\u2014left no room for lowercase letters. this meant that most early programming languages<\/a> (fortran, pascal, lisp) were written exclusively in uppercase. it was only between the \u201960s and \u201970s, when hardware manufacturing started to mature and memory costs started to plummet, that more characters became possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n