Mail Archives: cygwin/2007/01/17/12:36:36
Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E] wrote:
> From: Luke Kendall
>> <philosophy>
>> I wonder how many centuries of human endeavour has been
>> absorbed because of the decision to use CR+LF as line
>> endings in DOS?
>> </philosophy>
>
> <OT>
> To be fair, \r\n seems to go back to Gary Kildall's CP/M.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unprintable_characters
> </OT>
As far as I know, Unix is actually the oddball, using only a single
character to represent two actions on the old ttys, a carriage return
followed by a line feed. All oses I used before I was exposed to Unix had
<cr><lf> line endings - these included various other mini and microcomputer
oses of the late 70s early 80s era.
Note that it was important to send the carriage return *before* the line
feed, to give the carriage head more time to actually return all the way to
the start of the line. If you did the line feed before the carriage return,
the next character after the carriage return could start printing while the
carriage was still returning! (Actually, this is only true of really old
style KSRs that didn't have much buffering, etc., but shows the history of
\r\n.)
And now that I'm way off topic, I'll just add that if anyone else wants to
continue reminiscing, lets take it to -talk.
Cary
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