On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 02:12:11PM -0500, Linus Hicks wrote: >On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >> >> Yeah, right, if this were in fact the 21st century, why would we ever >> have to deal with a 30 year old, idiotic-from-the-start text file format >> using two line ending chars? > >How quickly we forget... > >The first devices that had any understanding of this kind of data >stream generated display characters through mechanical means - much >like an old mechanical typewriter. These devices all had a carriage >that moved left to right or right to left depending on whether you >moved the paper or the print head while it struck an inked ribbon >between a platen and character dies that supplied a limited and fixed >set of characters. > >The people who designed these things obviously saw the carriage return >as distinct from the linefeed. In fact, these devices had no capacity >to buffer the input data stream and even at 300 baud, it took longer >to return the carriage than the interval between characters. If you >did not supply some non-printing characters in the data stream after >the CR/LF sequence, it would print the next character about half way >back to the beginning of the next line. > >If you sent only CR as line terminator, you got all lines printed on >the same line and eventually ate a hole in the paper. If you sent only >LF, the carriage would shortly reach the far right margin and print >each line in one character position on separate lines. > >Early design decisions, however well considered, sometimes remain to >encumber the future, often for reasons of compatibility. The >constraints of available technology at the time of an innovation can >play a crucial role in this process.
Ok, this discussion has teetered into off-topic territory, as it always does. Gary has already taken the discussion to the cygwin-talk list. If anyone is compelled to provide more history lessons (whether it's past history or future history), please use the cygwin-talk list. cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
