As part of changing how official U.S. Navy messages are delivered, the Navy will stop using all capital letters in messages.
“Lowercase messages are here to stay; they provide a more readable format, which can delivered to and shared on any of the current Web 3.0 technologies (chat, portals, wikis, blogs, etc.),” said James McCarty, the naval messaging program manager at U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, in a statement. The order was sent out on April 30, in an all-caps dispatch.
While many younger officers appreciate the change, some older ones do not.
“You have a lot of folks that have been around for a long time and are used to uppercase and they just prefer that it stay there because of the standardized look of it,” McCarty told the Navy Times. “But the truth of it is, as we move forward, it’s imminent.”
All-cap messages started in the 1850s, when the military started using teletype machines, which didn’t allow lowercase letters.
Along with other changes, including putting in new software, the Navy expects to save more than $15 million a year.
