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A Texas Instruments (IIRC) terminal with a telephone handset cradle and a thermal printer for output. So yes, the extreme terseness of "ed" and other Unix CLI u
by euroderf 3y ago
A Texas Instruments (IIRC) terminal with a telephone handset cradle and a thermal printer for output. So yes, the extreme terseness of "ed" and other Unix CLI utilities was a feature not a bug.
- hinkley 3y agoThe earliest teletypes were practically ticker tape weren’t they? You couldn’t redraw the “screen”, just reprint the command line every time you hit backspace. Which is also why CTRL-U and CTRL-W are commands that date back to teletype machines. Much quicker and cheaper to drop the entire input or a word and try again.
- mech422 3y agoyeah - I worked on ASR-35 teletypes, with a punch tape reader/writer and an acoustic couple modem ... I thought they came much later though like mid 70s/80s?
- hinkley 3y agoWhich they? I did a deep dive on CTRL-U once when someone gave me a good breadcrumb to start with, and those control codes were way, way older than I suspected. SO + Wikipedia seem to think it was the ASR-33, which was originally 1963. I had this notion that it was about 5 years before that. But it's clear the ASR-32 does not have a CTRL or a SHIFT key, and I'm not sure who they could have possibly stolen the idea from. Reading a little more reminded me of another fact: the ASR33 was the first commercial use of the ASCII character format, which was developed in parallel.