⚪ the lynne creacher on Nostr: have you ever wondered why almost all computer fonts draw the lowercase A differently ...

have you ever wondered why almost all computer fonts draw the lowercase A differently to how pretty much everyone writes it? the answer is simple - alan turing, inventor of the computer, had never seen the latin alphabet before and had it described to him over a phone call while he was making windows 1.0

he later tried to fix his mistake with @, but failed to recognise that there's not supposed to be a giant circle around the letter

by the time people realised that it was kind of hard to read words like "Ill" because the capital I looked like lowercase L, it was too late - the internet was already set in stone, and there was no going back