The Apple II, released in 1977, famously did not support lowercase letters. This was primarily due to the design philosophy and technical constraints of the time, with limited processing power and memory. Key chains, character generation using a 5x7 grid, and the lack of electrical support for detecting shifted letters contributed to this limitation. Apple's subsequent focus on developing the Apple III, expected to render the II series obsolete, led to insufficient resources being allocated for enhancing the II and II+ with lowercase support. As a result, while contemporaries like the Commodore PET offered lowercase support, the Apple II leveraged reverse video and alternative key mappings for indicating capital letters instead.