Phone manners are highly culture specific, so you may want to explore what goes on in some other languages (e.g. the Romance languages). There's also the issue of register (office/home), but again, office phone cultures are very different around the world. All caps - I understand it was Fred Brooks who introduced lower case to IBM computers, and it wasn't that long ago that lower case was not available on many computer systems (at least on screen displays e.g. Apple II Apple Writer). So the whole mixed case/all caps thing must be very recent. And email has been around for a surprisingly long time (check out the history of email in academia, which indicates that email must have been around before the intro of lower case in screen displays on many systems). It's worth checking out word processing literature too (rather than tech literature on this), as word processing (with dedicated word processors) really had quite a separate development path until recently. Louise