> I don't know why Unix used NL (==LF) instead. Perhaps a different har > dware device?
One reason (probably not the only one, but one): Bare CR on the model of DECwriter commonly shipped as PDP-11 console terminals tended to foul the ribbon, especially if you issued it from >40 character positions into the line. LF pushed the ribbon down into the holder (side effect: making it harder to foul the ribbon), and there was a switch on the DECwriter that would auto-add a CR to a bare LF (not the other way round), which saved a whole character frame on a 110-baud console terminal. BSD 2.x used LFs to try to optimize for that. Dunno if V6 or V7 inherited that weirdness from the PDP6 or not. The PDP6 at SAIL didn't have that problem (only a few DECwriters left by the time I got access to it, and NOTS didn't care). All the -11 DECwriters would jam if you ran 300 baud on the console.
