shebang strange thing...

[Ben Finney]

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 01:21:20 GMT, Steve Holden wrote:
> "Ben Finney" <bignose-hates-spam at and-zip-does-too.com.au> wrote in message
> news:slrnbfn2eb.rbb.bignose-hates-spam at iris.polar.local...
>> So, it was teletypes that needlessly preserved the CR and LF as
>> separate control operations, due to the typewriter-based thinking of
>> their designers.  If they'd been combined into the one operation, we
>> would have all the same functionality but none of the confusion over
>> line ending controls.
> 
> Although in actual fact the KSR33 teletype did need a fifth of a
> second to guarantee that the print head would have returned to the
> left margin from column 72 haracters was a "feature". Sometimes you
> would (all right, *I* would) depress the two keys in the wrong order,
> and the result was that you would see a single character printed in
> the middle of the new line during the "flyback" period.

Further highlighting the foolishness of keeping them as separate
operations.  If they interacted in this non-intuitive and damaging way,
the "go to the start of the next line" should have been a single
transaction for the user, with the implementation deciding how to carry
it out.

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