On Thursday 29 May 2008, Miles Fidelman wrote: > Actually, it dates back further than that, to ASR33 teletype > machines, where you needed to issue separate carriage return > and line feed characters to end a line - to i) physically > return the carriage to the beginning of the line, and ii) > feed a line of paper (turn the platten). (Anybody else out > there old enough to remember when ASR33s where THE standard > i/o device? :-)
One reason for that was that it took extra time to do a carriage return. Having a non-printing character required after a CR made sure that the carriage had returned before printing another character. Remember .. those things had no buffer. The character decoding was completely mechanical. The electrical feed consisted of a "current loop" that operated an electromagnet in sync with the serial code. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
