shebang strange thing...

[Fredrik Lundh]

Ben Finney wrote:

> CR stands for "carriage return".  If you're talking about a print head
> moving across the paper, you're no longer talking about a carriage
> "returning", so the terminology obviously didn't come from electric
> printers.
>
> Carriage Return is a direct reference to the paper carriage on a manual
> typewriter.  These predate electric printing machines, and thus the
> terminology was borrowed when teletypes needed control codes to control
> their print head.

let's see: the first typewriters arrived in 1873 or so, and the baudot tele-
printer was patented in 1874.  sounds like parallel development to me.

the first electrical teletypes were, as far as I can tell, modified typewriters.

> So, it was teletypes that needlessly preserved the CR and LF as separate
> control operations, due to the typewriter-based thinking of their designers.

I think you're seriously underestimating the effort it took to build an
electromechanical telegraph machine at the very beginning of the 20th
century.

</F>