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On Friday 11 January 2002 10:09 pm, Mark S. Reglewski wrote:
> On Friday, January 11, 2002 at 11:44 AM dman wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 10:27:39PM -0600, Donald R. Spoon wrote:
[snip]
> Hahahahaha. You are obviously not old enough to remember the
> archeological artifact called a typewriter. These mechanical devices
> were used, before personal computers loaded with word processors and
> text editors, to create hard-copy printed output such as letters, term
> papers, and the like. The canonical overstrike character used to wipe
> out errors in preliminary drafts of typewritten documents was the 'x'.
> *Very* informal documents might even be distributed to recipients
> without the x overstriking having been cleaned up.
>
> The hackers who coded vi and the ex line editor upon which it is based
> lived in the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs walked the earth, and
> many documents were prepared with typewriters. This is *probably* the
> origin of 'x' as delete in vi and its clones. Only way to be sure is
> to ask the coders themselves, of course, but I'd bet a lot on my
> conjecture's being correct.
I *am* old enough, and painfully banged them out on a Smith-Corona.
Boy, was I glad when I discovered WordStar.
However, I never thought about that reason. ("They" made use use
white-out...)
- --
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Ron Johnson, Jr. Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Jefferson, LA USA http://ronandheather.dhs.org |
| |
! "Millions of Chinese speak Chinese, and it's not |
! hereditary..." |
! Dr. Dean Edell !
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