[time-nuts] Lady Heather's Leap Log

[Chuck Harris]

Lux, James P wrote:

>> Well, POSIX decided on LF, Mac on CR and Billy Boy decided to hedge
>> his bets with both LF and CR. It's little wonder I always get a lot of
>> double spacing here then :-)
>>
> 
> Hardly microsoft's fault. Blame the teletype. Or perhaps DEC.  RT-11 stored
> CR/LF in files, and CP/M adopted that convention, followed by DOS, etc.
> I imagine RT-11 did CR/LF because
> A) it allows use of unmodified KSR/ASR 33 TTYs without having to worry if
> the user has the autoLF option
> B) with ink on paper, the ability to do overprints (CR w/o LF) is actually
> useful. Them newfangled CRT based terminals can't do this (except for the
> Tek 401x series)

The fault was in the thinking that there would never be more than one or
two terminal types used as consoles and I/O devices, so the applications
programs should handle I/O directly.

That fault was fixed once and for all with unix's termcap... the idea that
the driver should present as common as possible of an interface to the
application.

MS had ample opportunity to follow that example, as it was well established
back in the early 1970's.  They chose instead to reinvent the wheel, and ignore
most of the advances that came before them.

They still do.

-Chuck Harris