Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
Teletypes, OTOH, really did use one character to advance the platen by a line, and a second to move the print-head to the left. (and may have needed "rub-out" characters to act as timing delays while the print-head moved)
I remember writing a printer driver for a terminal which kept the print head horizontal position "soft". The trick to printing fast was to start a line feed, and use horizontal positioning (returns, backspace, space, tab) as part of the time delay required before printing the first actual printing character. Once you had to print a printing character, we used ASCII NULs (though I have seen rub-out used as well) to finish the time delay needed. Since we needed eight (or was it twelve) chars of delay, this driver substantially improved the print speed for our listings.
--Scott David Daniels scott.dani...@acm.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list