3 ms·
Remarkably uninteresting. Next: Let us discuss what the Unicode Character 'REVERSE LINE FEED' (U+008D) is good for.
by timonoko 5y ago
Remarkably uninteresting.
Next: Let us discuss what the
Unicode Character 'REVERSE LINE FEED' (U+008D)
is good for.
- tdeck 5y agoVERTICAL TAB is much more puzzling.
- mananaysiempre 5y agoDevices that needed to produce output on printed forms would use a physical reference to ensure the text went to the right place. One of the commands a tabulator could give the typewriter it drove was to move the form to the next marked position—a literal tab, or maybe a functional equivalent like a hope in a punched tape. Thus, vertical tab.
- asddubs 5y agointeresting, hadn't heard of it before. Apparently it was primarily for printing purposes https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3380538/what-is-a-vertical-tab https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3380538/what-is-a-vertic...
- mark-r 5y agoUninteresting depends on your perspective. For anyone old enough to have used a Teletype certainly it is no mystery, but how many of us are left? Speaking of, a Teletype didn't understand anything outside of the ASCII range. So what was reverse line feed good for? Absolutely nothing! The author remarks that his Teletype was old because it didn't have lower case. But in my experience that was almost universal - I think I only saw a single Teletype that had lower case.
- timonoko 5y agoOlivetti Teletype had lower case. I had an interesting episode, where the University of Nitpicking Nazis discussed if my thesis, printed entirely on Teletype, was acceptable. -- It was not as good-looking as with IBM Selectric, but quite comparable to regular manual typewriters.
- mark-r 5y agoWas it the letterforms that bothered them, or the curled yellow paper?
- timonoko 5y agoI really dont know, I think it was a moral issue. When the paper was made by a computer, it was like cheating. I would have been cheap and easy to hire a professional typist to make a copy, but it would have been so lame, that I refused to do it. Few years later those same professors got their own computer terminals and then they demanded personal computer operators. Masters of Academia do not dirty their hands on keyboards.
- mark-r 5y agoSomeone needs to introduce them to Donald Knuth.
- wrycoder 5y agoUntil you insert a floppy written in DOS into a Unix machine.