I've been wanting to write a little about how practices from 50 years ago are influencing developers today. As an experiment, I'm starting a series over on Medium: medium.com/@pragdave/weir… Please let me know what you think.
@pragdave This is a great idea! But you shouldn’t use Medium IMO.
@pragdave Fun! What I remember on those teletypes is that they could immobilize the keys until the system was good and ready for your input. 0-key typeahead with attitude.
@pragdave That first post is terrific. It might be too obvious to mention (but then it might not be), that tab is an abbreviation for tabular, to help formatting tables.
@pragdave It reminded me to be grateful the card & tape readers were unplugged from our uni the year before I started. So although we learnt about them, we were saved the papercuts. Also, less hate for the tabs - they work fine if you don't sully them with spaces!
@pragdave Really nice article, thank you for taking the time to write it. I didn’t know about DEL
@pragdave A great article which brought back memories. I started programming a couple of years before your timeline, in 1958, using 5-track paper tape on the Ferranti Pegasus.
@pragdave There's a bunch of these in every field, and they're always fascinating to learn about.
@pragdave ISTR that NUL was also used for devices than took a long time to move the carriage (or type head), so instead of sending CR-LF, one sent CR-LF-NUL-NUL-NUL-... as many NULs as needed to be sure that things were properly positioned.