- June 13, 2013 11:15am EST
Recently, a U.S. congresswoman sent around an email that called for an end to TV commercials that were louder than the TV shows people were watching. The subject line of that email was in all caps, though, so I joked on Twitter that it was, ironically, like she was yelling at all of us.Why? Since the days of AOL dial-up, those of us schooled in Internet etiquette know that writing in all caps online is tantamount to screaming. But one organization that didn't get the message - until now - was the U.S. Navy.
Historically, Navy messages have been formatted in capital letters. But officials are now getting with the times and allowing for upper and lower case letters.
"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.)," James McCarty, the naval messaging program manager at U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, said in a statement.
The Navy is actually developing a new messaging system, known as Command and Control Office Information Exchange (C2OIX), which is scheduled to go live in August 2013. It will ditch the current Defense Message System (DMS) and roll it into its existing email infrastructure.
"One hundred servers are going to be replaced by five new servers that will handle all messaging for SIPRNet (secret internet protocol router network)," McCarty said, at a savings of about $15 million per year when live.At this point, the Navy still has systems that can't handle messages with upper and lowercase letters. "In these instances, the C2OIX system will be able to convert the text to upper case before making final delivery," McCarty said.
That problem is expected to be fixed by 2015, the Navy said.
[Image]
